The Waste Makers - Soil and Health Library

The Waste Makers
BY VANCE PACKARD
LONGMANS
LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO LTD
6 & 7 CLIFFORD STREET, LONDON W I
605-6II LONSDALE STREET, MELBOURNE C I
443 LOCKHART ROAD, HONG KONG
ACCRA, AUCKLAND, IBADAN
KINGSTON (JAMAICA), KUALA LUMPUR
LAHORE, NAIROBI, SALISBURY (RHODESIA)
LONGMANS SOUTHERN AFRICA (PTY) LTD
THIBAULT HOUSE, THIBAULT SQUARE, CAPE TOWN
LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO INC
119 WEST 4OTH STREET, NEW YORK 18
LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO
137 BOND STREET, TORONTO 2
ORIENT LONGMANS PRIVATE LTD.
CALCUTTA, BOMBAY, MADRAS
DELHI, HYDERABAD, DACCA
Copyright © 1960 by Vance Packard
This edition first published 1961
Printed in Great Britain by
Lowe & Brydone (Printers) Ltd., London, N.W.10
To my Mother and Father
who have never confused the possession of
goods with the good life.
Acknowledgments
I WISH TO EXPRESS MY GRATITUDE TO THE MANY PEOPLE WHO
counseled or otherwise aided me in assembling this book. My sense of
indebtedness is especially great to the staff members of Consumers
Union—especially Mildred Brady and Florence Mason—who showed
such patience in supplying me with information and advice. I also feel
particularly indebted to William Zabel for the many hours he spent in
1958 helping me understand some of the then-known ramifications of
planned obsolescence.
It is not possible to cite by name all of the several hundred people
who contributed to this book by offering insights, information, or
criticism. And some, I know, would not wish to be identified. However,
I would like to express my special appreciation to Leland Gordon,
Raymond Loewy, Warren Bilkey, Robert Cook, Louis C. Jones, Loring
Chase, George Stocking, R. E. Runzheimer, Charles and Nancy Saxon,
Edward and Jane Eager, and, of course, Kennett and Eleanor Rawson
and my wife Virginia.
Finally, no statement of indebtedness would be complete for a book
such as this if I did not take account of the help I received from the
viewpoints and conclusions of others who have wrestled with some
aspects of the problems that will be dealt with here. Fifteen persons who
come most immediately to mind as having stimulated my own thinking
are: Harrison Brown, Stuart Chase, Joseph Clark, John Kenneth
Galbraith, Robert Heilbroner, Aldous Huxley, Joseph Wood Krutch,
Paul Mazur, Reinhold Niebuhr, Fairfield Osborn, David Potter, Joseph
Spengler, Barbara Ward, Colston Warne, William Whyte, Jr.
VANCE PACKARD
Contents
Part I
THE DEVELOPING DILEMMA
1.
2.
3.
City of the Future?
The Nagging Prospects of Saturation
"Growthmanship"
Part II
IN RESPONSE, NINE STRATEGIES
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
There's Always Room for More
Progress Through the Throwaway Spirit
Progress Through Planned Obsolescence
Planned Obsolescence of Desirability
How to Outmode a $4,000 Vehicle in Two Years
America's Toughest Car—and Thirty Models Later
The Short, Sweet Life of Home Products
Fashion Lines for the Kitchen
The Repairman's Paradise
Progress Through Planned Chaos
Selling on the Never-Never
Hedonism for the Masses
Progress Through Proliferation of People
Part III
IMPLICATIONS
17.
18.
19.
20.
Ever-Mounting Consumption?
The Vanishing Resources
The Commercialization of American Life
The Changing American Character
Part IV
SOME SUGGESTED COURSES
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
Restoring Pride in Prudence
Restoring Pride in Quality
Respecting the Eternal Balance
Facing the Unmet Challenges
Achieving an Enduring Style of Life
Reference Notes
Index
A society in which consumption has to be artificially stimulated in
order to keep production going is a society founded on trash and waste,
and such a society is a house built upon sand.
—DOROTHY L. SAYERS in Creed or Chaos
PART I
The Developing Dilemma
CHAPTER 1
City of the Future?
WHAT WILL THE WORLD OF TOMORROW BE LIKE? IN THE COURSE OF
this book we shall examine a number of probabilities based on
projections of current trends. Spokesmen for industry like to speculate
about tomorrow even more than the rest of us. They invite us to peer out
onto the horizon and see the wondrous products their marketing experts
are conceiving for us. We are encouraged to share their dreams and to
tingle at the possibility of using voice writers, wall-sized television
screens, and motorcars that glide along highways under remote control.
Most of these marketing experts, despite their air of chronic excited
optimism, are grappling with a problem that would frighten the wits out
of less resolute people. That problem is the specter of glut for the
products they are already endeavoring to sell.
If we could probe the real dreams of these marketing people as they
slumber restlessly at night, we would find—when a smile finally settles
on their faces—that they are not dreaming merely of more bewitching
products to sell to us. More likely, they are dreaming that they are in
their private world of the future, where selling has again become easy
because the haunting problem of saturation has been vanquished. This
Utopia might be called Cornucopia City, and its setting is out on the
misty horizon of time.
In Cornucopia City, as I understand it, all the buildings will be made
of a special papier-mâché. These houses can be torn down and rebuilt
every spring and fall at housecleaning time. The motorcars of
Cornucopia will be made of a lightweight plastic that develops fatigue
and begins to melt if driven more than four thousand miles. Owners
who turn in their old motorcars at the regular turn-in dates—New
Year's, Easter, Independence Day, and Labor Day—will be rewarded
with a one-hundred-dollar United States Prosperity-Through-Growth
Bond for each motorcar turned in. And a special additional bond will be
awarded to those families able to turn in four or more motorcars at each
disposal date.
One fourth of the factories of Cornucopia City will be located on the
edge of a cliff, and the ends of their assembly lines can be swung to the
front or rear doors depending upon the public demand for the product
being produced. When demand is slack, the end of the assembly line
will be swung to the rear door and the output of refrigerators or other
products will drop out of sight and go directly to their graveyard
without first overwhelming the consumer market.
Every Monday, the people of Cornucopia City will stage a gala
launching of a rocket into outer space at the local Air Force base. This
is another of their contributions to national prosperity. Components for
the rockets will have been made by eighteen subcontractors and prime
contractors in the area. One officially stated objective of the space
probing will be to report to the earth people what the back side of
Neptune's moon looks like.
Wednesday will be Navy Day. The Navy will send a surplus
warship to the city dock. It will be filled with surplus play-suits, cake
mix, vacuum cleaners, and trampolines that have been stockpiled at the
local United States Department of Commerce complex of warehouses
for surplus products. The ship will go thirty miles out to sea, where the
crew will sink it from a safe distance.
As we peek in on this Cornucopia City of the future, we learn that
the big, heartening news of the week is that the Guild of Appliance
Repair Artists has passed a resolution declaring it unpatriotic for any
member even to look inside an ailing appliance that is more than two
years old.
The heart of Cornucopia City will be occupied by a titanic pushbutton super mart built to simulate a fairyland. This is where all the
people spend many happy hours a week strolling and buying to their
heart's content. In this paradise of high-velocity selling, there are no
jangling cash registers to disrupt the holiday mood. Instead, the
shopping couples—with their five children trailing behind, each
pushing his own shopping cart—gaily wave their lifetime electronic
credit cards in front of a recording eye. Each child has his own card,
which was issued to him at birth.
Conveniently located throughout the mart are receptacles where the
people can dispose of the old-fashioned products they bought on a
previous shopping trip. In the jewelry section, for example, a playfully
designed sign by a receptacle reads: "Throw your old watches here!"
Cornucopia City's marvelous mart is open around the clock, Sundays
included. For the Sunday shoppers who had developed a churchgoing
habit in earlier years, there is a little chapel available for meditation in
one of the side alcoves.
Is Cornucopia City to become not a feverish dream, but, instead, an
extreme prototype for the City of Tomorrow?
Certainly in the next twenty years the broad outlines of Cornucopia
City will come to seem less and less fanciful, if current trends continue.
Already a chapel has been built in a shopping center outside Miami.
Already the General Dynamics Corporation has under development a
lifetime electronic credit card. Already watches are being sold as
fashion accessory items. Already paper houses are being marketed.
Already the life expectancy of motorcars has been showing a notable
drop. Already supermarkets are staying open around the clock in many
areas, with push-button markets under development. Already the
stockpiling and disposing of subsidized but unwanted agricultural
products have become a world-wide scandal. Already some home
furnishings are being built to break down within a few years, and
product makers have been showing a disconcerting fascination with the
idea of setting "death dates" for products.
And, finally, already the pressures to expand production and
consumption have forced Americans to create a hyperthyroid economy
that can be sustained only by constant stimulation of the people and
their leaders to be more prodigal with the nation's resources.
This presents us with another specter, one so disconcerting that
Americans have thus far chosen to suppress awareness of it. That is the
dangerous decline in the United States of its supply of essential
resources. Once fabulously rich in these, the United States is now a
have-not nation and is becoming more so every month. United States
industrial firms are grinding up more than half of the natural resources
processed each year on this planet for the benefit of 6 per cent of the
planet's people. In the lifetime of many, if not most, of us, Americans
will be trying to "mine" old forgotten garbage dumps for their rusted tin
cans.
The people of the United States are in a sense becoming a nation on
a tiger. They must learn to consume more and more or, they are warned,
their magnificent economic machine may turn and devour them. They
must be induced to step up their individual consumption higher and
higher, whether they have any pressing need for the goods or not. Their
ever-expanding economy demands it.
If modifications are forced upon the private-enterprise system of the
United States in the future, it will be because that system did too good a
job of filling many of the needs of the people. Defeat on such terms, we
should all agree, would be saddening.
Man throughout recorded history has struggled—often against
appalling odds—to cope with material scarcity. Today, there has been a
massive break-through. The great challenge in the United States—and
soon in Western Europe—is to cope with a threatened overabundance of
the staples and amenities and frills of life. Conceivably, even the longimpoverished and slower-starting Soviet Union may someday find itself
trying to deal with an overflowing of goods. The United States,
however, already is finding that the challenge of coping with its
fabulous productivity is becoming a major national problem and is
inspiring some ingenious responses and some disquieting changes. This
book will deal with the systematic efforts being made to encourage
citizens to be more careless and extravagant with their nation's
resources, and what these efforts imply.
When I refer to the waste makers at large in the land, I refer
primarily to those who are seeking to make their fellow citizens more
prodigal in their daily lives. In a broader sense, however, it could be
asserted that most Americans are becoming waste makers. If I can help
it, there will be no villains in this book. A charge of rape cannot be
sustained by any adult when consent or co-operation has been given.
Prodigality is the spirit of the era. Historians, I suspect, may allude to
this as the Throwaway Age.
Further—and let's face it—a good many Americans and Europeans
have a pretty direct stake in the failure or success of businessmen in
inducing us all to be more wasteful. The wife of a supermarket operator,
the engineer working for an appliance company, the schoolteacher who
owns a few shares of stock in a motorcar company—all these kindly
people may feel uneasy about the wastefulness they see, and yet they
have a vested interest in its accelerated perpetuation. And the
professional marketer whose efforts to induce prodigality they may
deplore is simply the trained expert employed to work on behalf of the
firms that contribute to their own support.
While our focus will be on the wastefulness being promoted by
United States industry in order to sell its ever-mounting stockpiles of
products, we should recognize that wastefulness has become a part of
the American way of life. The landscape of the globe is becoming
strewn with armaments and other materiel abandoned by employees of
the United States government. A spokesman for the United States Army
Ordnance Corps acknowledged in 1960 that the Army had goofed in
losing track of a million dollars' worth of motorcycle parts squirreled
away in a Georgia warehouse. When they were found after fifteen
years, the parts had become worthless except for scrap. And it was
disclosed that the Navy had been paying $21 for lamp sockets selling
for 25 cents in retail stores.
And many labor practices, too, have become a part of this pattern of
wallowing in waste. Many workingmen today show more concern for
feather-bedding, gold-bricking, getting onto their boats, or collecting
their "rocking chair" compensations, than they do for developing a
standard of workmanship for themselves that is worthy of pride. They
want their tri-level house in the suburbs but often aren't willing to put in
a decent performance to earn it.
In a restaurant in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, I overheard a businessman,
with tears in his eyes, tell his wife he had decided to abandon his
business because his employees were goofing off so badly that he could
not get a decent day's work out of them.
But all these forms of wastefulness in American life seem to stem in
large part from the fantastic productivity of the nation's mechanized,
often automated offices, factories, and farms. That productivity is the
central fact. And its impact is seen most conspicuously in the efforts of
United States business to cope with it by promoting ever-higher levels
of private consumption and a philosophy of waste.
Where are we drifting under the pressures to make us more
wasteful, imprudent, and carefree in our consuming habits? What is the
impact of all this pressure toward wastefulness on the United States and
on the behavior and character of its people? These, I think, are
momentous questions. Let us explore them with all the compassion and
forbearance we can muster.
CHAPTER 2
The Nagging Prospects
of Saturation
"Marketing men across America are facing a fact that is hard for
them to swallow. America's capacity to produce may have outstripped
its capacity to consume."—ERNEST DALE, Graduate School of
Business and Public Administration, Cornell University.
TODAY, THE AVERAGE CITIZEN OF THE UNITED STATES IS
CONSUMING twice as much in the way of goods as the average
citizen
consumed in the years just before World War II. Nearly two fifths of the
things he owns are things that are not essential to his physical wellbeing. They are optional or luxury items. And there are signs that
physical possessions are becoming too plentiful to accommodate
comfortably. Visiting foreigners comment that the abundance of
America seems to spill over into the aisles of stores, spread along the
highways, and bulge out the doors, windows, and attics of houses.
There is this general evidence of profusion of material wealth even
though there is a substantial residue, numbering millions of families,
that remains unquestionably ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-housed. And the
television set may be substituting for adequate food in the family
budget.
In a good-humored forecast of things to come, the senior editor of
Sales Management asserted on May 6, 1960: "If we Americans are to
buy and consume everything that automated manufacture, sock-o
selling and all-out advertising can thrust upon us, each of our mounting
millions must have extra ears and eyes and other senses—as well as
extra income. Indeed, the only sure way to meet all the demands may be
to create a brand new breed of super customers."
Consumption must rise, and keep rising. Some marketing experts
have been announcing that the average citizen will have to step up his
buying by nearly 50 per cent in the next dozen years, or the economy
will sicken. In a mere decade, advertising men assert, United States
citizens will have to improve their level of consumption as much as
their forebears had managed to do in the two hundred years from
Colonial times to 1939.
The recent exhortations for greater consumption have been inspired
by bulging inventories of goods, which in turn are caused primarily by
two factors. One is the ever-growing efficiency of the United States
productive force, thanks in large part to the introduction of automated
equipment in the offices and factories of nearly a hundred thousand
United States companies. During the postwar years, the amount of
goods and services that one man can turn out in an hour has increased
about 3 per cent every year. This increased output can be absorbed if
each citizen consumes more, or if there are, each year, more citizens.
Otherwise, there will be less work.
The other factor is the great expansion of United States productive
facilities based on the conviction in executive suites that the public can
be induced to consume more each year. In 1959, the advertising and
marketing journal, Printers' Ink, asserted: "Our automobile plants could
turn out eight million cars this year if they dared." But it said the
industry would be lucky to sell about half that number. And it added
that several other major industries were facing the same "dilemma."
Labor leader Walter Reuther complained that in four years the United
States had "lost" nearly one hundred billion dollars' worth of potential
output because of "under-utilization" of its productive capacity.
Much of the postwar boom in sales has come from supplying
products that were badly wanted, if not badly needed. But after a dozen
years the specter of satiation is rising to challenge the sellers of many
products. A true salesman rejects the concept that a market can ever be
satiated; but even the salesmen are beginning to admit that much of the
urgency is going out of the demand for their products. Sales
Management conceded: "The American consumer has been surfeited
with all kinds of wonderful products since the end of the war. He's
probably tired, a little jaded, eager for something different."
Today, about nine out of ten American homes contain at least one
refrigerator, one television set, and one electric or gas stove. And seven
out of ten have a vacuum cleaner, an electric toaster, and an electric
food mixer. There are more passenger cars in the land than there are
families.
If you are a producer and most families already own your product,
you are left with three possibilities for making further sales. You sell
replacements; you sell more than one item to each family; or you dream
up a new or improved product—or one that at least seems new or
improved—that will enchant families that already own an "old" model
of your product. (A fourth possibility is to move into a different line.)
The challenge of finding significant improvements that can be made
in existing products, however, is becoming more difficult each year.
How much more can a toaster or sofa or carpet sweeper or sewing
machine be improved, really?
When the Appliance Technical Conference was held in Chicago in
1958, the vice-president of engineering for Whirlpool Corporation made
a notably candid statement. He said: "The industry has wrung the last
possible ounce of research out of the present appliance products. We
can only offer prettier equipment." He urged the industry to start basic
research in the properties of clothing and meats in order to come up
with radically new products.
All this is not to suggest that genuine technological improvements
are not being made—or in prospect of being made—in some products.
The push-button and long-distance dialing telephone and the jet
passenger airplane are improvements that have produced considerable
enchantment among consumers. There is the probability that Americans
soon will be offered improvements in home products that will produce a
degree of enchantment in some circles: refrigerators with no moving
parts, ultrasonic dishwashers that reportedly will remove fried egg from
plates, remote-control stoves, lighting based on electroluminescent
phosphors for ceiling or wall panels.
But how much should we rejoice when a company introduces a
toaster with nine buttons, which make it possible to obtain a piece of
toast in any of nine shades? How much should we rejoice when another
company introduces a mechanical martini-stirring spoon, which relieves
the person stirring from the labor of twisting his wrist? And what
American housewife is dreaming of the day when she can prepare
breakfast by simply flicking a bedside switch, which will turn on an
electronic recipe maker coded on punch cards?
A columnist for Advertising Age, the forthright E. B. Weiss, took
note of the general drying up of spectacular product improvements
when he wrote: "Certainly when one compares the 1959 models of
autos and major appliances and TV sets with the 1956 models, one must
be compelled to wonder whatever happened to the great scientific
improvements that must have been the result of hundreds of millions
spent by these manufacturers over this period in research work of every
kind." A year earlier, Mr. Weiss complained that much of the product
improvement "has tended increasingly toward small details of trim, as
in the case of the upswept rear fins on cars of late vintage, and toward
gimmicky gadgets of little true importance." The changes that were
being wrought in the laboratories frequently were simply superficial
changes and improvements that could be used as selling points by copy
writers.
Whenever engineers in the appliance industry assembled at
conferences in the late fifties, they frequently voiced the lament that
they had become little more than push buttons for the sales department.
It should also be noted that much of the straining to bring out new
products was inspired to a very large extent by a desire on the part of
producers to gain more shelf space in the supermarket jungle. Consumer
Reports, which is issued by Consumers Union, explained the strategy in
this way: "A good deal of what is called product research today actually
is a sales promotion expenditure undertaken to provide what the trade
calls a profitable 'product mix.' A judicious product mix is, among other
things, a combination of brands designed to commandeer for the
advertiser the greatest possible shelf space in the supermarket." The
result was often a multiplication of brands. A single soap company thus
might have three liquid detergents competing with one another.
Frequently the so-called new product was simply a new packaging
concept. A professor of pharmacology at the University of California
charged that much of the publicized money going into the research of
new drugs was actually being spent in a quest for patentable variations
on things that were already selling well.
During this same period, Americans were seeing a similar
slowdown in the unveiling of brand-new kinds of products. At a time
when appliance dealers were pleading for something new and exciting
to stir public interest, Home Furnishings Daily reported: "Major
advances in existing appliances and introduction of completely new
appliances cannot be expected for at least several years."
When Fortune magazine reviewed the fifties for its readers from
business management, it stated that in consumer goods "the fifties held
few surprises." Among the few significant new products it could think
of were tranquilizing pills. And it could point to such notable
improvements on existing products as power steering, power brakes in
motorcars, and stereophonic sound in phonographs. But these, it
conceded, "were relatively modest accomplishments, from a technical
point of view." It stated that during the fifties the makers of consumer
products had not brought forth "a single innovation comparable to the
automobile (which became commercially important at about 1910), the
radio (early twenties), the mechanical refrigerator (mid-twenties), the
automatic washing machine (late thirties), home air conditioning and
television (late forties)."
Furthermore, it said that no product of impact comparable with the
automobile, radio, television, etc., was in sight for the sixties. Fortune
professed to find it somehow comforting that business had learned how
to increase sales year after year when it had little significantly new to
offer the public. Writer Roger Burlingame also previewed the sixties
and reported he could see nothing at the moment that was basically new
in products for the use of the common man. The exciting advances were
being made in such fields as preparation for space travel.
The growing dependence of the United States economy upon
programs financed by the federal government that might in a more sane
day be abolished also has created apprehension among those concerned
about the future of the economy. Several billion dollars are being spent
each year to encourage fanners to raise crops the country does not want
or need. Farmers happily pour fertilizer in record-breaking carloads into
soil that should be resting. Billions of bushels of the resulting crops are
moved into government-built storage bins, costing billions of dollars,
made from millions of tons of metal that is scarce in the United States.
Some have called the program plain corruption. And Max Moxley, farm
editor in Sterling, Kansas, complained, "Our farm prosperity is entirely
artificial. There's surplus grain piled everywhere you look. It rather
takes away the joy of a good harvest for me. I'm sure the whole folly
will come falling down around our ears—and soon, perhaps."
Even more massive and crucial in terms of its stimulus to the United
States economy has been the defense spending, which has reached
nearly fifty billion dollars a year—or a tenth of the nation's entire output
of goods and services. Many United States senators find themselves
under strong pressure to protect big aircraft and missile contracts, Naval
installations, and Army bases in their states. Any cutbacks would throw
some constituents out of jobs, and hit some of their local industries. In
1959, when stock-market prices dipped briefly after President
Eisenhower announced that he was meeting with Russian Premier
Khrushchev, some financial analysts reported the dip was caused by
"peace jitters" among the traders. Financial columnist Sylvia Porter
noted that every time there has been a suggestion of a major cut in
Pentagon spending "the stock market has gone into a tail spin." On the
other hand, in May, 1960, when the Russian capture of the U-2 plane
was followed by the collapse of the summit meeting, Wall Street stockmarket prices advanced during seven successive days. The Russians,
too, apparently had been having internal trouble because of the "peace
scare." Various accounts of the turn to greater belligerence on the part
of the Soviet Union cited as influential the lobbying of two hundred and
fifty thousand Soviet officers who were scheduled, under disarmament
plans, to be demobilized. They reportedly did not relish the prospects of
going into civilian jobs as rank-and-file comrades.
The recession in the late fifties served as a sharp reminder to many
of the developing dilemma posed by the need for ever-greater
production. Recessions were nothing new. But this one was the most
severe of the three postwar recessions. In many industries, companies
found themselves with heavy inventories of goods and began cutting
back production. The public was still buying, but not fast enough. A
bewildered advertising executive was reported complaining that up until
the last few months Americans had been the most desiring people in the
world. As unemployment became a worrisome problem, a marketing
journal warned that the unemployed worker produces nothing that can
be advertised and sold, and he consumes little beyond necessities.
Marketers reacted to the challenge of coping with mounting glut
during the recession by shifting to the really hard sell. In Flint,
Michigan, sales executives began firing a cannon every time a motorcar
was sold. Citizens across the land were admonished by industrialists
and government leaders of all stripes to begin buying for their own
good. At a press conference, President Eisenhower was asked what the
people should do to make the recession recede. Here is the dialogue that
followed:
"A.—Buy."
"Q—Buy what?"
"A.—Anything."
The President was advised that this was possibly an oversimplified
response in view of the fact that his own Secretary of the Treasury was
then urging people to put their money into government bonds. The
President then said the public should buy only what it needs and
"wants." An appliance store in Killingsley, Connecticut, immediately
responded by putting this sign in its window: "OKAY IKE, WE'RE DOING
OUR PART!"
The countryside rang with slogans that drummed home the patriotic
or selfish reasons why everyone should pitch in and consume more. In
Detroit, a forty-five-voice chorus cried out five hundred times a week
over television and radio: "Buy days mean paydays . . . and paydays
mean better days. . . . So buy, buy! . . . something that you need today."
Other slogans beamed at the American public were:
"You auto buy now."
"Buy now—the job you save may be your own."
"Buy and be happy."
"Buy, buy, buy; it's your patriotic duty."
"Buy your way to prosperity."
The Advertising Council unleashed a campaign to create
"Confidence in a Growing America." And the State Commerce
Commissioner of New York conferred with business and labor leaders
and then launched a campaign to persuade the public to "Buy it now!"
The onus was on the consumer to save the day.
Whether dutiful consumers licked the recession is not clear. The
federal government, while it acted quietly, certainly played a major role.
It poured several billion extra dollars into the economy for such things
as pay raises, farm subsidies, missiles, and highways, thus
unquestionably helping to quicken the enfeebled national economic
pulse. But consumer spending was probably decisive, because there
never was any serious over-all decline in buying by consumers. In fact,
four billion dollars more was spent for goods and services in 1958 than
in 1957. Consumers spent less for big-ticket items such as appliances
and motorcars, but their spending for services such as amusement and
for "soft goods" such as food, clothing, tobacco, and drugs rose all
during the recession.
By 1959, prosperity had returned even to the automobile and
appliance industries. Cash registers were ringing merrily. Finally, too,
but with plaguing slowness, the massive clot of unemployment began to
dissolve into manageable proportions. Automation in three years had
wiped out nearly a million jobs in industrial production, forcing many
people to find jobs in the service industries. Meanwhile, increases in
output per man seem likely to rise by about 40 per cent by 1970, and at
least a million additional workers will be coming onto the labor market
each year. The problem of absorbing them comfortably is likely to be
most challenging.
The United States economy is depending on the willingness of
consumers and the government to spend more each year than they have
the preceding year. Some economists suggest that whenever United
States citizens fail to step up their over-all consumption by at least 4 per
cent in any given year they are inviting a "failure-to-grow recession."
How to live with mounting productivity is each year becoming a more
urgent problem for Americans, and soon it will be plaguing Western
Europeans. In the United States, unused productive capacity is edging
up almost every year. It has quadrupled in a decade.
In the early months of 1960, U.S. News & World Report indicated
that the cornucopia of the United States was perhaps working too well
when it said: "Goods are superabundant. Unsold cars in the hands of
dealers are at a near record level. So are inventories of many kinds of
household equipment. Steel output is having to be cut back." This was
when consumers were breaking an all-time record in their spending.
At about the same time, President Eisenhower in his annual
economic message said that prosperity could be sustained only if
consumers—as well as management and labor—"perform their
economic functions." Seymour Harris, Harvard University economist,
aptly summed up the challenge facing the United States by stating: "Our
private economy is faced with the tough problem of selling what it can
produce."
CHAPTER 3
Growthmanship"
"Men's appetite for goods must be quickened and increased." —
PAUL MAZUR.
OUT OF ALL THE ANXIETIES CREATED BY THE DESIRE TO ESCAPE THE
developing dilemma and to make the economy hum at ever-higher
levels has come a clamor for "growth." Economic thinkers of many
stripes have joined in the call. Certainly this is the first time in history
that the felt need for growth has been so self-consciously vocalized.
Marketers talk of the need to increase sales of consumer goods and
services by a hundred and fifty to two hundred billion dollars within a
decade. Labor spokesmen have called for "rapid expansion." Political
candidates for the Presidency in both parties have called for more
growth. Conservatives who became uneasy about some of the novel
ideas their rivals were offering to promote growth sneered that the rivals
were making a high-level game of "growthmanship." In 1960, both
party platforms called for more growth and differed only on how it
should be achieved.
Some people have pointed to the Russian claims of rapid growth as
a justification for the United States to embark on a crusade to increase
its total output. With many of these, any output is considered to add to
the military potential of the nation whether it involves more deodorants,
more hula hoops, more electric rotisseries, or more pinball machines.
The fact that the United States is already outproducing Russia in
consumer durables by at least twenty to one is generally ignored. Also
ignored is the fact that Russia has managed to startle the world by
sending a giant satellite around the moon with a total national output
that has been less than half of that of the United States. Russia simply
has a different set of national priorities.
Furthermore, the Soviet example being held up as a challenge to the
United States becomes less impressive on close inspection. Its rate of
economic growth, for example, is less remarkable than that of Mexico,
Japan, or West Germany. Compared with that of the United States, its
percentage of annual growth of output seems impressive simply because
it is starting from a lower base and because it is an underdeveloped
country trying to catch up with an overdeveloped one. Economist W.
Allen Wallis, special assistant to the President, observed in 1960: "Even
if Russian growth rates continue higher than ours, the absolute gap
between us will continue to increase for some time to come. . . . There
is no possibility that the Russian economy will overtake ours at any
time in the visible future—certainly not in this century."
Still, the Russian growth rate is widely held up as a minimum
challenge for Americans if they are to hold up their heads in the world.
Whether the growth is particularly needed to promote the well-being of
the American people is rarely even considered. No one has considered
that you can make a country overgrow just as the Pentagon has
concluded that you can "over-kill" any possible enemy if you keep on
producing hydrogen bombs beyond any rational need. And few have
considered that while some selective kinds of growth may well be
needed in the United States, other kinds are undesirable or would
produce only surfeit. It is just assumed that any growth is good. Growth
is fast becoming a hallowed word alongside Democracy and
Motherhood.
Some—but not all—planners in the federal government have also
been preoccupied with the idea that any growth is good for the country.
As novelist John Keats pointed out, "Washington's planners exult
whenever a contractor vomits up five thousand new houses on a rural
tract that might better have remained in hay." 1 In mid-1960, reports
from Washington revealed that there was a strong feeling within the
Administration that more liberal allowances should be made for the
obsolescence of business equipment in order to "foster economic
growth," by permitting faster tax write-offs of existing equipment.
How will all the sought-after growth be achieved? That has been the
chief point of contention. Businessmen have been wary of some of the
ideas tossed around by politicians and liberals as smacking of
boondoggling. They are passionately convinced that the great challenge
facing the nation is to make sure the citizenry will be induced to enjoy
more and more of the good things of life—which they, of course, will
be more than happy to produce.
To a pre-1950 economic thinker this would seem like no challenge
at all. Historically, economists have assumed that people will
automatically consume eagerly everything that their nation's economy
can turn out for them. This concept is often referred to as Say's Law. A
French economist of the past century, Jean Baptiste Say, concluded that
production is bound to equal distribution. Say's Law was conceived in
an era of scarcity. There was so much poverty of even the necessities of
life that a ready and eager market was assumed.
In the mid-twentieth century's era of abundance, however, his law
became less and less relevant. Desire did not necessarily keep pace with
productive capacity. More pertinent for the new era were the concepts
of Paul Mazur, partner of a Wall Street investment house, who has
become widely accepted as a leading apostle of "consumerism." Early
in the fifties, he pointed out that every recent United States recession
had been caused by the failure of business to gear its production down
to what could clearly be consumed, or a failure to see that consumption
kept pace with production. The result was jammed warehouses and a
depressed market. In his The Standards We Raise, widely admired at
least by the marketers of industry, he asserted:
"The giant of mass production can be maintained at the peak of its
strength only when its voracious appetite can be fully and continuously
satisfied. . . . It is absolutely necessary that the products that roll from
the assembly lines of mass production be consumed at an equally rapid
rate and not be accumulated in inventories."
Thus the challenge was to develop a public that would always have
an appetite as voracious as its machines. The chief economist of the
world's largest advertising agency, J. Walter Thompson, asserted in
1960 that Americans would need to learn to expand their personal
consumption by sixteen billion dollars per year if they were to keep
pace with this production ability. All this backlog of what he called
consumer need was awaiting "activation by advertising." This, he said,
represented the "real opportunity" of the day.
The central problem was to stimulate greater desire and to create
new wants. And this was becoming a little more difficult each year. In
the late fifties, Advertising Age carried this headline: "CREATING DESIRE
FOR GOODS GETS HARDER." It quoted the chief of research of a Los
Angeles newspaper who stated: "Productive capacity has outstripped
our efficiency in creating desire for goods." He added that it was
becoming increasingly hard to create a burning desire for things.
People should be persuaded to expand their wants and needs, and
quickly. The head of J. Walter Thompson made that point and
explained: "We must cut down the time lag in expanding consumption
to absorb this production." This agency's various pronouncements on
the state of the nation indicated that it had become infatuated with the
phrase "time lag." Everything could be blamed on the time lag. This
implied that Americans had great unrecognized wants which they would
inevitably discover eventually. They just had to be educated and
activated. The agency's research director, however, warned that "the
velocity of change in living standards needed to match the most
conservative estimates of future productive ability nearly staggers the
imagination."
The emerging philosophy was most fervently and bluntly stated
perhaps in two long articles in The Journal of Retailing during the midfifties. The author was Marketing Consultant Victor Lebow. He made a
forthright plea for "forced consumption." 2
"Our enormously productive economy . . . demands that we make
consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of
goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfactions, our ego
satisfactions, in consumption. . . . We need things consumed, burned up,
worn out, replaced, and discarded at an ever increasing rate."
At other points he spoke of the "consumption requirements of our
productive capacity" and of the "obligation" of retailers "to push more
goods across their counters."
As businessmen caught a glimpse of the potentialities inherent in
endlessly expanding the wants of people under consumerism, forced
draft or otherwise, many began to see blue skies. In fact, Sales
Management featured a blue sky on the cover of one of its issues as the
sixties approached with this exhortation from management to marketers:
"Go GET US A TRILLION-DOLLAR ECONOMY."
At the time this order was given, the United States economy was
still approaching the half trillion mark.
Such heady resolutions could be implemented if the public could
somehow be induced to feel the need to buy more and more products
and services. Men's appetite for goods needed indeed to be quickened
and increased.
Old-fashioned selling methods based on offering goods to fill an
obvious need in a straightforward manner were no longer enough. Even
the use of status appeals and sly appeals to the subconscious needs and
anxieties of the public—which I have examined in earlier works 3—
would not move goods in the mountainous dimensions desired.
What was needed was strategies that would make Americans in
large numbers into voracious, wasteful, compulsive consumers—and
strategies that would provide products assuring such wastefulness. Even
where wastefulness was not involved, additional strategies were needed
that would induce the public to consume at ever-higher levels.
Happily for the marketers, such strategies were emerging or were at
hand. They had been forged in the fires of the fifties and were being
perfected for use in the sixties.
It is nine such strategies and their implementation that we shall
explore in detail in the next thirteen chapters. They need to be
understood because, for better or worse, they are influencing profoundly
the climate in which the people of the United States—and, to a growing
extent, the people of the rest of the Western world—live.
PART II
In Response, Nine Strategies
CHAPTER 4
There's Always Room
for More
"Every family needs two homes."—THE DOUGLAS FIR
PLYWOOD ASSOCIATION.
AS THE MARKETING EXPERTS GROPED FOR WAYS TO KEEP SALES
soaring in the face of mounting saturation, one of the first thoughts that
struck them was that each consumer should be induced to buy more of
each product than he had been buying. The way to end glut was to
produce gluttons. But, of course, it would not be put that baldly.
Consumers should be provided with plausible excuses for buying more
of each product than might in earlier years have seemed rational or
prudent.
Thus it was that carpet makers announced, through their Carpet
Institute, that each family should buy more rugs because "HOME MEANS
MORE WITH CARPET ON THE FLOOR." Rug retailers were advised in
Home Furnishings Daily that they could expand their sales in three
ways: sell more rug per room (the ideal was wall-to-wall); sell more
rooms in the house as rooms that deserve coverage by rugs; and "trade
up"—selling prospects higher-priced material than they had planned to
buy.
The makers of one deodorant introduced a he-she kit for husbands
and wives, so that they could get two applicators rather than one in each
master bathroom. Men previously had tended to use their wives'
applicator rather than buy their own.
Hosiery manufacturers began trying to sell more pairs of stockings
to each American woman by introducing colored stockings. Women
were told that their stockings should match whatever costume or
accessories they would be wearing. This concept of more-sales-throughmatching took hold in a number of fields. A spokesman for Revlon,
Inc., the cosmetics firm, explained that one of the secrets of the
company's fabulous success during the late fifties was that it "taught
women to match their nail enamel to their moods and occasions, so that
they bought more."
The major makers of women's swimming suits not only managed to
double the average price of suits in a decade, but managed to put more
swim suits into each woman's wardrobe. Women who once possessed
only one suit were owning several. One of the Big Four swim-suit
producers, Catalina, began promoting the idea of having one suit for the
morning sun, one for the noonday sun, and a third for the evening sun.
And another of the Big Four, Rose Marie Reid, began urging that
women use one suit for swimming, one for sunning, and one for
"psychology."
Makers of eyeglasses set their sights on the goal of selling more
spectacles per head. The Optical Wholesalers National Association
began promoting the notion that every person wearing glasses needs
more than one pair. A spokesman explained: "We want glass wearers to
own several pairs now—not only for safety but for style as well." He
explained that glasses had definitely become a fashion accessory.
"There are plenty of women today," he added triumphantly, "who buy a
new pair of glasses to match every new outfit. Style-conscious men own
several pairs, too. They buy them for business and sports wear—just
like a suit."
The concept of color "matching" in order to broaden sales was also
used in promoting home accessories. A spokesman for Kleenex tissue
announced over a television network that "there's a color for every room
in your home." And the Bell System sought to get more telephone
extensions in each home by the same there's-a-different-color-for-everyroom approach. American Telegraph and Telephone urged, in fact, that
families install a second, entirely new line into the house for extra
convenience. A Midwestern telephone company official told me of a
study made in motels that showed that telephoning could be increased
about 20 per cent by the use of phones in a color other than the
conventional black. Apparently bright colors promote an impulse to call
someone just for the heck of it.
A campaign by the world's largest manufacturer of wedding rings to
popularize the "double ring" ceremony greatly increased the sale of gold
wedding rings. Several hundred radio commentators and society editors
began making special note of the fact if the groom, as well as the bride,
wore a nuptial ring.
The makers of a number of products for the home concluded that no
home was really a home if it did not have doubles in the products they
were promoting. The president of Servel, Inc., announced that the
American standard of living now called for "two refrigerators in every
home." The chief of the washer division of the American Home
Laundry Manufacturers Association declared that a well-equipped home
should have two washers and two driers. Meanwhile, the Plumbing
Fixture Manufacturers Association began promoting the "privazone"
home. In a privazone home, each member of the family has his own
private water closet. Radio manufacturers disclosed with pride that they
had succeeded in selling an average of three radios to every family in
the land.
Perhaps the ultimate of this two-or-more-of-a-kind concept—which
began so humbly in the twenties with the political promise of two
chickens in every pot—was the promotion of the idea of two homes for
every family. Home builders began pressing the idea. Others joined in.
Building suppliers, appliance manufacturers, and advertising agencies
excitedly grasped the potentialities inherent in spreading the idea that
every family needed a town house and a country house, or a work house
and a play house. The marketing possibilities were spelled out by an
official of the plywood association in these terms: "The second home is
going to . . . provide tremendous markets for everybody in the buildingmaterials field, for appliance manufacturers, builders, and developers,
lending agencies, etc. We in the plywood industry are leading the
parade."
Another leader of the two-house parade was the J. Walter
Thompson advertising agency, which began pointing out in business
journals the inviting potentialities of the two-house family. "With the
two-house family," it said, "America has clearly entered a new age of
consumption for household equipment." It pointed out that the twohouse family is likely to have: three or four bathrooms, two to four
television sets, two fully equipped kitchens, four to twelve beds,
multiples of furniture, linens, rugs, china, etc.
And, of course, a two-house family would have to have more than
one car. J. Walter Thompson called for an "aggressive advertising and
selling" campaign to overcome the public's "habit lag" in sticking with
one car when two cars were obviously desired for modern living. One
attempt at aggressive re-education was conducted by the Chevrolet
company. Its announcer on the Dinah Shore program began talking of
those deprived citizens who were victims of "one-car captivity." The
essence of the message, as television critic John Crosby assimilated it,
was that, "You peasants who own only one car . . . are chained to the
land like serfs in the Middle Ages." The way to liberation, of course,
was to buy a second car. And business writers reported that the idea was
rapidly taking hold. By 1960, one family in six had become a multiplecar owner. In the Los Angeles area, the ratio was far higher. A largescale Eastern farmer tells me that every single one of his farm hands
now owns two cars.
Some car owners might complain that the streets and highways in
many sections of the United States were already agonizingly
overcrowded, but marketers felt a great increase in motorcar ownership
was needed. J. Walter Thompson found that there was a "latent potential
demand" for thirty million additional cars on the road. That would bring
the total number of motorcars on the roads up to about ninety million.
(Other estimates indicated that at the present rate of economic and
population growth there should be four times as many motorcars on
United States highways by A.D. 2000!)
Another tack that the marketers took was to try to induce Americans
to demand more with each product bought. It should be either bigger or
more complex, or both, in order to be appropriate for modern living.
The goal was to justify a higher price tag. Victor Lebow in his blueprint
for "forced consumption" put this imperative of a higher price tag in
these words: "The second essential is what we might call 'expensive
consumption. ' " Even dolls became bigger and more expensive.
The lawn mower offers an excellent illustration of the strategy of
upgrading the nation's concept of what is appropriate. A simple-minded,
intensely rational person might assume that hand mowers would be
increasingly popular today and that power mowers would be almost
impossible to sell. After all, lawns are getting smaller all the time. And
adult males are feeling more and more the need for physical exercise as
they spend more time in sedentary, short-week jobs. They come home
from the office beating their chests and growling for exercise. The
situation that has developed, however, shows how dangerous it has
become to try to anticipate consumer behavior by the application of
humorless logic, and ignoring the role marketing strategies may play.
The lawn-mower industry was able to convince American males
that it was somehow shameful to be seen pushing a hand mower. And
power mowers were promoted as a wonderful new gadget. Powermower sales rose seventeenfold in fifteen years! By 1960, more than
nine out of every ten lawn mowers sold were powered. Such powered
mowers cost from three to five times as much as hand mowers.
Furthermore, having a mere motor on your mower was not enough in
some neighborhoods. You also needed a seat on it. Hundred of
thousands of American males began buying power mowers with seats.
These, of course cost ten times as much as a hand mower. A
Midwestern auto-accessory chain began using a "save your heart" theme
to promote sales of self-propelled power mowers. One trade journal
reported that this merchandiser "makes it a practice to trade customers
up into higher-priced units." And so the mower industry was able to
keep its dollar volume rising in a most satisfying manner. Apparently
more advances were still to come. Newsweek carried a prediction that
by 1970 electronic lawn mowers would be sweeping over lawns on preprogramed patterns without human attendants.
A few months ago, I was present when a technical expert from the
British Standards Institution inspected a display of American
refrigerators and stoves. He kept shaking his head in amazement. Some
of the stoves had twenty-eight dials and push buttons. He smiled. But it
was the gargantuan size of the United States products that most puzzled
him. "Why so big?" he kept asking. One stove had eighteen inches of
empty surface space between burners. "We wouldn't ordinarily want so
much space," he said. It was explained to him that Americans had been
conditioned to demand a big-looking stove—and to excuse it on the
ground of needing work space. We turned to the giant "fridges," as he
called the refrigerators. He observed: "We keep in an ordinary pantry
many of the things you put in the 'fridge.' "
As with most marketing techniques, the strategy of loading more
and more of the product onto each consumer was brought to fullest
flower in the motorcar industry. Each year during most of the fifties,
Detroit doggedly and energetically added "more car per car." The now
familiar additions—all costly— took the form of greater bulk, greater
power, more power accessories, and more chrome.
Chevrolet offered a good case in point. During the thirty-year period
ending in 1958, the Chevrolet car grew four feet in length and
underwent a fivefold increase in horsepower. Its passenger car had more
horses under its hood than many large trucks. Originally few buyers had
shown much interest in its most dressed-up, most expensive model, the
Bel Air. But over the years the Chevrolet selling staff succeeded in
trading up so many prospects to the Bel Air that it became the
company's most popular model, and in 1959 the Impala was introduced
to top the Chevrolet line.
The result of all this customer loading in the motorcar industry was
that, by the late fifties, a United States workingman had to work fiftythree hours longer in order to buy its cheaper models than he did a
decade earlier. (And this figure does not make any allowance for the
greater burden of installment charges in the late fifties; nor does it take
into account the far greater cost of upkeep.)
As motorcars became heavier and more powerful, the many power
accessories quickly sucked the life out of batteries and required
expensive replacements. Laurence Crooks, automotive consultant to
Consumers Union, summed up the greater wear and tear of the big
motorcars that were developed in these words: "Nearly every factor
which increases engine output has a price in wear or durability. . . .
Multiple carburetors, high-lift valves, stiffer valve springs, bigger
manifolds, all take their toll in one way or another."
And then there were the once lowly mufflers. The rate at which they
collapsed underneath the large, highly powered motorcars became the
basis for one of the nation's fastest-growing industries. Mufflers were
burning out substantially faster than they had a decade earlier. A halfbillion-dollar industry emerged to replace mufflers.
Partly the ravaging of mufflers was due to the higher acidity of
high-octane gasoline that was recommended for the high-powered
motorcars. Partly it was due to the greatly increased use of dual exhaust
systems supposedly required to cope with all those extra horses under
the hood. Dual exhausts began protruding from a third of all motorcars
sold, and were esteemed as symbols of prestige since they first appeared
on very high-priced motorcars. The trouble with the duals was not only
that they added to the cost of the vehicle and cost twice as much to
replace but also that they corroded faster, especially in stop-and-start
city driving. With the duals, mufflers often did not become hot enough
to clear out the eroding condensation.
But perhaps most important, the boom in mufflers was greatly
stimulated by shrewd merchandising. Until the fifties, mufflers had
been sold matter-of-factly. Marketers hadn't seen the possibility of
promoting them as profitable impulse items for uneasy motorists. Now
muffler makers were finding they could often double muffler sales at a
service station within a few weeks merely by putting up a curbside sign
reminding motorists that their mufflers might need replacing. In two
years, Midas, Inc., built up a network of muffler-installation dealers.
Aside from the quality of its product, in order to help attract customers
on further grounds, it beamed much of its multimillion-dollar
advertising campaign at housewives. Midas painted its mufflers a
golden color. And it hired psychologists to instruct its installation
personnel how to behave in a refined manner around the ladies who
would be waiting for their mufflers to be replaced.
The greatest toll of the large and complex motorcar, however, was
in the way that the land yacht guzzled gasoline and oil. Despite vague
open-end claims in the motorcar ads about fuel economy ("up to 15%
savings"), gas mileage dropped relentlessly. Tide, the advertising
journal, reported that mileage dropped from close to twenty miles per
gallon to fifteen miles per gallon in the first eight years of the fifties.
The motorcar industry's annual ritual of the Economy Run became an
embarrassment. This run had been conceived to prove that the new cars
were better than ever. The decline in miles per gallon was obscured for
a number of years by the fact that the winners were judged on a tonmile basis. This is the amount of work done by a gallon of gasoline, as
in moving a ton of motorcar through one mile. On this basis, the
winners usually were multitonned monsters. Popular Science made a
long-range analysis of actual miles-per-gallon figures of the races and
concluded that by 1958 mileage had "sagged down" to almost 14 per
cent below the twenty-year average. And this occurred despite the great
advances in the ingenuity of drivers in nursing their motorcars along the
course.
For the average motorist the mileage decline meant he had to buy
approximately one hundred more gallons of gasoline per year. A
number of New York City garage managers concluded that in four years
their parking capacity had shrunk 15 per cent because of the growth in
the size of motorcars. They began applying a surcharge on the biggest
of the big motorcars.
It was in this setting that the makers of small foreign cars first began
making noticeable inroads on the United States market. The Detroit
planners had not counted on this factor to upset their controlled market.
Until the foreign cars appeared, they had succeeded in frightening
Americans away from the idea of a compact car by referring to it in
derogatory terms such as "stripped down." As Eric Larrabee put it, in
Detroit "the equations are fixed: small equals cheap equals bad, and
large equals expensive equals good. Detroit has no way of appealing to
the small-car customer without insulting him; it offers him the tail end
of the procession, and never lets him forget it."
As pressure grew upon Detroit to offer the public the option of
buying less ponderous motorcars, one automobile executive reflected
the general lack of stomach for meeting such a need when he said: "If
the public wants to lower its standard of living by driving a cheap,
crowded car, we'll make it."1
And so it was that compact motorcars started emerging from the
plants of Detroit's Big Three. Furthermore, they emerged with every
contrivable manifestation of exultation. Now citizens were able to read
stirring accounts which revealed how the chiefs of some of the major
companies had really, in secret, been dreaming of and planning for this
great day of offering a compact car for nearly a decade.
At first Detroit expected—and undoubtedly hoped—that the
compact market would be confined to a modest percentage of the whole
market. Any such hopes were dashed as millions of Americans—
delighted to be rid of their oversized gas guzzlers without suffering
serious social stigma—sought to buy the modest-sized American and
foreign-made motorcars. In a sense, the Detroit-built dam broke. There
were clearly limits to the power to manipulate public taste. United
States compacts and small foreign motorcars began accounting for a
third of all sales. Some dealers begged Detroit not to feature the smaller
cars so much in advertising because their profit per unit was smaller on
the small cars (even though business journals reported that very
generous profit allowances had been arranged in the pricing structure).
Many marketers of motorcars began taking an exceedingly dim
view of the rush to compacts. Printers' Ink reported: "Companies and
dealers are both glum about the trend. It means shaved profits per unit
on the smaller cars, increased sales effort to move more cars." Some
economists expressed concern, too, about what the trend implied for the
steel industry. The compacts required a half-ton less steel per car. And
they wonder how a drop in gas consumption will influence roadbuilding plans that were based on assumed revenues from taxes.
Gradually, however, the motorcar marketers began seeing that the
situation was not without promise. They discovered that it might be
possible to return to a situation in which the American family would
again be spending more dollars each year for its transportation. If the
public had the choice of motorcars of all sizes, it should be easier to lure
more families into the ranks of the two-car families. It was now
perfectly safe and appropriate socially to park a compact car in front of
one's house provided one also had a regular-sized car parked there. A
Ford engineering executive told a convention of admen that in the days
ahead the size and kind of car one owned might not be as important as
the number of cars one owned.
The marketers also began seeing another basis for optimism. They
decided that the prospects were good for gradually raising the price they
received by adding size, accessories, and luxury touches to the
compacts. Fortune magazine rhetorically asked its executive-type
readers in late 1959: "Can the [motorcar] industry still go on increasing
its take per unit?" The magazine's answer was a resounding yes. It
explained:
"There are good reasons why it can. To begin with, the compact
versions of the expensive cars doubtless will not be low-priced
compacts—any more than the Jaguar sedan, though it is a compact auto,
is a low-priced one . . . the industry doubtless will apply the more-car-
per-car formula to smaller cars as well as to larger autos. . . . many
devices may make compact cars more expensive than the 1960
models—such as air conditioning, automatic transmissions, and stationwagon versions of the compacts. . . . Other accessories may well be
loaded on even the most austere cars."
Some of the other journals with a wide readership among marketers
also rang out the hopeful news of trends to come. Business Week
reported, "Detroit has started a new lap of the horsepower race, this
time with the new compact cars." The Chrysler Valiant, for example,
could now be had with 148 horsepower instead of 101 horsepower.
Advertising Age quoted a cheerful Buick dealer in Houston as stating:
"Having little cars won't make any difference to us. We'll build
customers up to a little better car." And U.S. News & World Report
predicted that "newcomers in the field will be substantially larger and
more luxurious than those now on the market. The present compacts are
already adding extra features."
And so happy days would come again.
But more about strategies to induce us to step up our consumption
of motorcars later, when we take up planned obsolescence.
Another general tack the marketers took was to try to induce people
to get rid of the products they already owned. In its broadest form this
took the form of encouraging people to throw things away.
CHAPTER 5
Progress Through the
Throwaway Spirit
"/ do love having new clothes . . . but old clothes are beastly. . . .
We always throw away old clothes. Ending is better than mending . . .
ending is better than mending . . . ending is better. . . ." Soft voice of
sleep teacher indoctrinating the young while they sleep in Aldous
Huxley's Brave New World.
IN THE HAIR-RAISING UTOPIA THAT MR. HUXLEY PROJECTED FOR SIX
centuries hence, babies come in bottles and the zombie-like citizens
move about in doped-up bliss. To keep the industrial machines
humming, each citizen is "compelled to consume so much a year." To
that end, newness as a trait is cherished. And sleep teachers stress love
of newness because they have the responsibility of "adapting future
demand to future industrial supply." The dictator of the Utopia,
Mustapha Mond, at one point explains: "We don't want people to be
attracted by old things. We want them to like the new ones."
When Huxley wrote his book in 1932, he was visualizing what
might come about in the distant future. But within a quarter century the
people of the United States, without any help from dictators or out-andout sleep teachers, were exhibiting a throwaway mood that would tickle
even Mustapha Mond. Much of this was deliberately encouraged. The
voice of the television announcer—in 1960—chanted, "You use it once
and throw it away. . . . You use it once and throw it away." This specific
chant was used to promote the sale of a deodorant pad. And a steel
company, in a television commercial, showed a pleased housewife
dropping a metal can that had contained soft drinks into the
wastebasket. No fussing with returns!
Residents of the United States were discarding, using up,
destroying, and wasting products at a rate that offered considerable
encouragement to those charged with achieving ever-higher levels of
consumption for their products. A business writer for Time magazine
related, as the sixties were about to begin: "The force that gives the U.S.
economy its pep is being generated more and more in the teeming aisles
of the nation's stores. . . . U.S. consumers no longer hold on to suits,
coats, and dresses as if they were heirlooms. . . . Furniture, refrigerators,
rugs—all once bought to last for years or life—are now replaced with
register-tingling regularity."
The new mood of the disposable era was reflected in the pages of
the Engineering News Record, which observed: "Nowhere in the world
except in the U.S. would a skyscraper office building in sound condition
be torn down merely to be replaced by another one."
Dennis Brogan has characterized modern Americans as a people
"who go away and leave things." The voluptuous wastefulness of
modern Americans could be seen not only in their littered parks but in
market surveys. The industrial-design firm, Harley Earl Associates of
Detroit, reported. "In most households we found there were two to five
rolls of Scotch tape—but no one could locate any of them."
Americans have developed their own democratic version of sleep
indoctrination of the young. There are the soft, insistent commercials
the youngsters hear during their weekly twenty-odd hours of television
watching. And there are the breakable plastic toys, which teach them at
an early age that everything in this world is replaceable.
An American sales executive told me of the shock his Dutch mother
exhibited at the wastefulness of Americans when she visited his
Connecticut home town for the first time. Apparently she could not
endure what she saw. On the last day of her visit she took the son
triumphantly to the closet of her room. The closet was stacked high with
neatly folded metal foil, plastic containers, paper wrappings, and cord.
Americans like to think that in the earlier days, if not today,
frugality was the rule. The maxim, "Waste not, want not," was often
repeated. The pioneers of the United States did cherish and guard their
bread pans and iron pots. When they moved on and had to leave
furniture behind, they did not drive to the dump as modern Americans
do. Instead, they held an auction. Each fabricated item was cherished,
perhaps because it was hard to come by. It had what economists call
high marginal utility.
On the other hand, all through the last half of their history, since
A.D. 1800, Americans have been careless with their nation's natural
resources such as buffalo and timberlands, perhaps because they once
seemed to have so much of them. Louis Jones, director of the New York
State Historical Association, told me: "I think prodigality has been a
bright-colored thread running through all of our history from the
Revolution on." Mr. Jones made the point, however, that in earlier days
much greater care was taken to produce "a product that would satisfy a
customer for a long time." Durability was esteemed. And the national
ideal was to make the most of what one had.
Against this background let us take note of some of the efforts that
have been made to promote the throwaway spirit in North America
recently.
Steaks and other meats have appeared in disposable aluminum
frying pans. When the steak is done, just throw away the pan along with
the nasty old grease. Muffins come in throwaway baking tins.
Hungarian goulash began being offered in throwaway plastic boil-in
bags. Charles Mortimer, the chairman of General Foods, exulted that
Mrs. Consumer was learning to expect "dinners which can be popped
into the oven, heated, served in the pan, and the pan tossed into the trash
can after dinner!"
Even the bother of popping the dinner into the oven apparently was
soon to be ended. A sales executive of the Aluminum Company of
America announced that the day was at hand when packages would
replace pots and pans. Electric food packages were being planned with
their own plugs, and single-use cooking containers were being prepared
for pre-packaged meats.
Pre-prepared, no-fuss, no-mess meals bought at extra cost may
make sense for the minority of families where the wife holds a job. But
for the great majority of families there was little such justification. Yet
all were coaxed to indulge.
A number of companies began perfecting new push-button foods
that would squirt up out of metal aerosol cans. Under development were
such squirtables as omelettes, angel-food cake mix, fruit whips,
catchup, barbecue sauce, and spreads for cocktail crackers. More than a
hundred million cans of squirtable whipped cream were being sold a
year. Just throw away the dead squirt can.
One aspect of the aerosol cans of special interest to those anxious to
promote higher levels of consumption was that the dead cans often were
still not empty of food. The compressed gases inside that have been
widely used tend to lose pressure before the containers are empty of
food. Packagers speculated on "what the consumer will accept as a
reasonably economic amount of the product." 1 In short, how much food
could remain inside the dead can without causing resentment or
suspicion? My eighteen-year-old son first demonstrated to me the food
loss when an aerosol can of chocolate sauce for Sunday-night sundaes
seemed to be empty. Disregarding warnings not to "puncture" the can,
he hammered a hole in the bottom of the can and retrieved several
spoonfuls. In two other instances he retrieved enough whipped cream
from apparently empty cans to cover two and three strawberry
shortcakes lavishly. Now we whip our own.
Fortunes were made as the craving for convenience which Mr.
Mortimer referred to swept the nation. A company called Standard
Packaging, which specializes in making "disposables," tripled its sales
in four years to become a hundred-million-dollar corporation. This
company makes trays that can be cooked, bags that can be boiled, bowls
and other eating utensils that can be discarded to eliminate dishwashing.
Its hard-running young boss, R. Carl ("Hap") Chandler, explained
happily: "Everything that we make is thrown away." 2 Sales
Management sought to analyze the secrets of Stan-Pak's phenomenal
success. One of its headlines offered this clue: "STAN-PAK'S RESEARCH
EXPLOITS LAZINESS."
It went on to explain that as the company conceived the future,
"Tomorrow, more than ever, our life will be 'disposable.' "
All this packaging and disposing were not a free dividend to the
consumer. In some instances the package was costing ten times as much
as the product inside. Salt coming in small throwaway containers costs
seventeen times as much as salt bought by the pound. The metal aerosol
can with squirt mechanism and chemical propellant adds at least a third
to the cost of getting a topping for a sundae.
By the time Americans finish paying for all the inviting packaging
they are induced to buy, the annual bill is twenty-five billion dollars.
That is just the cost of the packaging, the wrapping. It is a figure worth
pondering for a moment. Divide it by the number of families in the
United States, and you come up with a staggering statistic, one almost
beyond belief. The average United States family today spends five
hundred dollars of its income each year just for the package!
And this apparently is only the beginning. As Mr. Chandler pointed
out in referring to the vistas opening for packagers in the food field:
"The growth in convenience foods is going to be terrific. We're just at
the beginning of the era." Industrial designers were solemnly explaining
in trade journals that often the package called for more careful research
and planning than the product it contains.
The throwaway mood was meanwhile invading many fields far
removed from food. Here are some random examples:
A throwaway mousetrap housed inside an aluminum shield was
being marketed. No messing around with the mouse. Just throw away
the whole unit. You don't even have to look at the victim.
Rochester Razor, Inc., began selling, in vending machines, a
throwaway plastic razor with built-in blade. The complete unit goes into
the wastebasket after use.
Corporate Research, Inc., placed on the market disposable paper
camping equipment, including tents and sleeping bags, for modern
campers.
One large New York department store advertised paper coveralls—
the main point being to throw them out.
Millions of Americans, instead of seeking an old-fashioned
"lifetime" watch, began buying inexpensive but serviceable watches and
then threw them away when they needed repairs, or when a more up-todate model hit the market. A men's clothing chain in New York
announced, "Watches have become carefully styled items in a man's
wardrobe." It was offering them as accessories.
Bud Berma Sportswear, Inc., made an unusual offer to tempt men
who already owned a sports jacket. It promised a five-dollar prize to
any man buying one of its jackets, provided he mailed in his old jacket
for disposal. The firm promised to give it "to some needy person
overseas." And it added: "For your generosity to someone in need, you
get this luxurious Bud Berma sports shirt in a choice of seven handsome
colors" as a bonus.
Your author recently lost a dental inlay after accepting a piece of
taffy from his daughter. In the emergency I sought the services of a
strange dentist in the New England town where I happened to be at the
moment. Only two weeks before I had received a thorough checkup
from my regular dentist, a man outstanding in his field. The new dentist
packed my mouth with gauze and a suction tube to drain saliva. While
waiting for his preparation to harden, he began tapping and picking at
my other teeth. I could not protest because of all the packings. He
announced worriedly that two of my existing fillings were in "bad
shape" and needed replacing. He probed around some more among my
thirty-odd fillings and then finally declared: "As a matter of fact, it
would be a good idea to replace all your fillings. They're getting pretty
old. It would save you money in the long run." I made strangled sounds
and shook my head violently. He changed the subject.
Each year American housewives were throwing away hundreds of
pounds of food scraps that used to be fed to dogs. Meanwhile, they were
spending a third of a billion dollars for prepared dog food. The most
popular, by 1960, was pressure-blown puffed meal chunks.
A color consultant from Toronto explained to the Inter-Society
Colour Council meeting in New York an ingenious scheme which a
client company had conceived for increasing the sale of potato peelers.
He began by pointing up a puzzling fact. Although potato peelers
"never wear out," enough are sold in two years in his country to put one
in every home. What happens to them? He gave this answer.
"Investigation reveals that they get thrown away with the potato
peelings." One of his colleagues, he added, had then come up with a
dazzling plan for helping along this throwaway process. He proposed
that their company paint its peelers a color "as much like a potato
peeling as possible." However, a potato-colored peeler wouldn't have
much eye appeal on the sales counter. They decided to solve that by
displaying the peeler on a colorful card. Once the housewife got the
peeler home and removed the bright card, the chances that she would
lose the peeler were excellent. He explained how this would work to the
benefit of the company in these terms:
"As most people wrap their peelings in newspaper . . . we figure that
if they once lay the knife down, it will disappear and be thrown out.
Next year we expect to double our sales."
A friend who ordered new kitchen cabinets from a national cabinetproducing company found that the factory had sent wrong-sized doors.
A representative immediately ordered new doors. But what about the
wrong-sized doors? The representative replied: "Oh, shucks, throw
them away! That is cheaper than taking them back."
In some cases the consumers have no choice but to be waste makers
because of the way products are sold to them. Many paste pots come
with brushes built into the cover, and the brushes fail by a half inch to
reach the bottom. No amount of wiggling or maneuvering will reach the
remaining paste. Thus millions of "empty" paste jars are thrown away
with a few spoonfuls of paste still in them. Likewise, millions of "used"
tubes of lipstick are thrown away with a half inch of lipstick remaining
in the tube because the mechanism will not bring up all the lipstick.
And then there are the billions of pills that are thrown away because
the druggist's label does not indicate what ailment they were intended to
relieve. The label will say "2 pills, 3 times a day" but usually it will not
say "For chest congestion," etc. Even the brand names—which are
occasionally listed—are not much help. Because of the proliferation of
brand-name drugs, there are many thousands of names. I find in my
own medicine chest eight bottles of nearly full pills whose labels have
no meaning to me or to my wife Virginia. One says "Polaramine,"
another says "Emprazil," a third says "Niamid—3 each day." Still
another merely states, "One, three times a day." And one reads, "2 at
start, 2 this evening, then one three times a day."
In a less wasteful society it would seem reasonable to expect that
the bottles would note the ailment they were prescribed to relieve, and
the expected life potency of the pills or fluid contained in the bottles.
The throwaway strategy was especially tempting to the makers and
sellers of automotive supplies such as spark plugs, since billions of
dollars' worth of materials was involved. Sometimes, however, the
marketing forces found themselves pulling in opposite directions. For a
number of years the American Petroleum Institute urged motorists to
throw away their dirty old sludge and install bright-new oil every
thousand miles. Motorcar manufacturers, in contrast, have stressed that
their gentle cars could nurse oil for a long, long time. In 1959, Ford was
promising prospective buyers that they would need to change oil only
once every four thousand miles. Later that year, the Petroleum Institute
grudgingly made a gesture toward bringing its advice within shouting
distance of that being offered by the motorcar manufacturers (some of
whom were promoting oil filters). It proposed that motorists change
their oil according to a formula that ran like this. In winter change every
two thousand miles or every thirty days, whichever comes first. And in
summer change every two thousand miles or every sixty days,
whichever comes first. Under this formula, the majority of drivers
usually would be changing their oil long before the two-thousand mark
was reached.
Runzheimer & Company reports that with well-managed company
fleets oil is likely to be changed somewhere between two thousand and
three thousand miles, depending on a number of factors including the
grade of oil used. Where sixty-cent oil is used, for example, the change
is likely to occur at three thousand miles.
The makers and sellers of "permanent" antifreeze—a quarterbillion-dollar market—had got themselves into a particularly awkward
spot in their sales claims. In fact, businessmen might find their dilemma
poignant. As Sales Management explained it, they were being forced to
"un-merchandise their earlier advertising." 3 They were now protesting
with quivers of anguish in their voices that the public had taken their
"permanent" claim too seriously.
It seems that motorists took their claim that antifreeze was
"permanent" so seriously that almost half were using their antifreeze for
more than one winter. More shocking to the marketers was the
discovery in a du Pont survey that almost half of the dealers believed
antifreeze was really "permanent." Another 12 per cent wouldn't be
pinned down on the subject. The result of all this faith in the
permanence of antifreeze was that the sale of antifreeze was slipping.
As Sales Management put it: "A large segment of the motoring public
swears on last year's antifreeze and the marketers are boiling over. . . .
When the marketers unwittingly labeled glycol 'permanent' they
oversold the product—and undermined future sales. Many brands are
labeled permanent, including some of the top-selling private labels and
two of the four manufacturers' makes. Olin Mathieson and DuPont huff
and puff about re-use—but Olin calls its glycol product 'Permanent
Pyro' and DuPont calls its Zerex 'Permanent Type Anti-Freeze.' "
A massive re-education campaign was launched by many antifreeze
makers. Some began talking about their "all-winter antifreeze." The gist
of the new theme widely sounded was that antifreeze—even
"permanent" antifreeze—was good for one winter only. One company
made a dealer movie in which bad guy John Carradine rumbled
ominously, "Why torture your motor?" However, another company was
offering a "full year's" protection at double the cost of glycol. And one
brave, company—duPont—revealed it hoped to promote a really
permanent antifreeze for about $7.50 per car. Or at least it is permanent
if it doesn't give a warning by changing color—from red to yellow—
because of contamination due to cooling-system failure.
The most flagrant attempt to promote a throwaway mood was that
of the Holland Furnace Company of Holland, Michigan. This company
is the largest seller of replacement furnaces in the nation, with five
hundred retail branches. In 1958, the Federal Trade Commission
ordered Holland to stop the strategy that had been used by some of its
salesmen to frighten furnace owners into replacing existing furnaces
with new Holland equipment. What follows in the next two paragraphs
is taken from reports of the commission.
The salesmen involved, according to the Federal Trade
Commission, sometimes posed as government or utility inspectors in
order to get into the homes. And some misrepresented themselves as
"heating engineers." A householder in the St. Louis area testified that
two young men came to her house and said, "We are from the
government inspecting furnaces," and asked for admission to the house.
She refused them permission and called the police. When the men were
picked up by the police and questioned, they identified themselves as
Holland salesmen. They denied telling her they were government
officers but admitted they had told her they were working with the
"government fuel-conservation program."
Once the Holland canvassers gained access to a home—either by
pretext or in response to invitations resulting from company
advertisements offering cleaning service or free inspections—"in many
instances" they dismantled furnaces without the owners' permission. In
some cases, the Federal Trade Commission asserted, "they then refuse
to reassemble them when requested, misrepresenting that this would
involve grave danger of fire, gas, and explosion." In other cases, it said,
they declared that the existing furnaces were beyond economical repair
or that companies making them were out of business. "Some of the
furnaces condemned by these agents," the Federal Trade Commission
order 4 asserted, "were proved to be either in safe condition or safely
repairable."
The Federal Trade Commission order upheld its examiner's ruling
that Holland's "false claims and improper business methods had caused
many owners to discard competitive furnaces prematurely in fear of
grave danger from continued use of this 'condemned' equipment." The
company denied or minimized the various accusations and turned to the
federal courts for relief. At this writing—two years and three court
decisions later—the matter is still under litigation.
CHAPTER 6
Progress Through Planned
Obsolescence
"Once in my life I would like to own something outright before it's
broken! I'm always in a race with the junkyard! I just finish paying for
the car and it's on its last legs. The refrigerator consumes belts like a
goddam maniac. They time those things. They time them so when
you've finally paid for them, they're used up."—Lament of Willy Loman
in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman.
WILLY'S LAMENT, OF COURSE, WAS JUST THE INTUITIVE OUTBURST OF
a badly exasperated man. But businessmen themselves, when in a
joking mood, sometimes ask the definition of the phrase "durable
goods." Their playful answer: any products that will outlast the final
installment payment.
What are the facts about the alleged short life of American
consumer goods? And if their life sometimes seems unreasonably short,
is it so by design?
The recent fascination of many businessmen with "planned
obsolescence" has been one of the major developments of the postwar
period. Its use as a strategy to influence either the shape of the product
or the mental attitude of the consumer represents the quintessence of the
throwaway spirit. Financial columnist Sylvia Porter reported in the late
fifties that "behind closed doors in the executive suites of giant
corporations from coast to coast" the wisdom of pursuing policies of
planned obsolescence was being argued. She added: "Never has a
debate of this sort—which touches the foundation of the American
standard of living—erupted so openly." Even on the floor of the United
States Congress a representative from Missouri offered his sympathy to
the millions of people "who find their new gadgets of all kinds falling
apart in use."
The phrase "planned obsolescence" has different meanings to
different people. Thus many people are not necessarily defending
deliberately shoddy construction when they utter strong defenses of
obsolescence in business. The Management Review of the American
Management Association, for example, reprinted an article with the
headline: "Obsolescence Can Spell Progress." This article referred to
the kind of obsolescence that is "a healthy dissatisfaction with doing
things less well than they can be done."
A somewhat different meaning apparently was involved when
Retailing Daily printed the assertion that "it is not only our privilege to
obsolete the minimum home and many home furnishings. It is our
obligation. We are obligated to work on obsolescence as our
contribution to a healthy, growing society."
And Brooks Stevens, a leading industrial designer, explained
obsolescence planning in these terms: "Our whole economy is based on
planned obsolescence, and everybody who can read without moving his
lips should know it by now. We make good products, we induce people
to buy them, and then next year we deliberately introduce something
that will make those products old fashioned, out of date, obsolete. . . . It
isn't organized waste. It's a sound contribution to the American
economy." Other designers, I should add, disagreed with Stevens'
viewpoint.
The American people themselves have been conditioned over the
years to respond favorably to some kinds of obsolescence. Many might
be appalled at the idea of owning a motorcar that would splendidly meet
their transportation needs for twenty or thirty years.
Webster's dictionary defines obsolescent as meaning going out of
use. For our purposes in examining modern marketing practices, we
should refine the situation by distinguishing three different ways that
products can be made obsolescent. There can be:
Obsolescence of function. In this situation an existing product
becomes outmoded when a product is introduced that performs the
function better.
Obsolescence of quality. Here, when it is planned, a product breaks
down or wears out at a given time, usually not too distant.
Obsolescence of desirability. In this situation a product that is still
sound in terms of quality or performance becomes "worn out" in our
minds because a styling or other change makes it seem less desirable.
The first type of obsolescence—the functional type—is certainly
laudable when planned. We all applaud when piston-driven passenger
planes are outmoded by swifter, quieter jet planes. We all applaud when
the hard-to-see twelve-inch television screen gives way to the twentyone-inch screen. We all applaud when we can dial a number hundreds
of miles away rather than work through operators. Many of us applaud
when high-fidelity recordings start to give way to stereophonic sound,
even though it means doubling much of the equipment.
In this last instance, however, it should be noted that there has
been—and increasingly will be—overtones of manipulation. Stereo was
held back in its development for many years because there was felt to
be no urgent need for it. The original patent for stereo was taken out by
a Briton in 1931, and soon thereafter some American companies
acquired the rights. By the late fifties, however, tens of millions of
Americans owned comparatively new phonographs, and the demand for
additional new-model hi-fi sets was slowing. In fact, a glut in the
pipelines of distribution threatened. A dramatically new product was
felt to be needed to force dealers to clear the channels and to induce
owners of existing hi-fi sets to feel their product was now inadequate.
Stereo was rushed into production to ease the impasse. And stereo, it
should be noted, offered the possibility of continuing to create
obsolescence for a long time to come. After the market for two-channel
stereo is saturated, the producers can switch to three-channel stereo. At
these higher levels, however, the obsolescence created is apt to be more
of desirability than of function. As a matter of fact, by 1960 several
major producers had introduced three-channel stereo equipment. On
tape, four-track, five-track, and even eight-track stereo are projected. A
trade journal, however, reported it was unable to find any manufacturer
who was willing to claim that three-channel stereo was a true technical
improvement. But most of them felt the public could easily be
influenced by numbers.
Let us grant that we are all heartily in favor of the functional type of
obsolescence that is created by introducing a genuinely improved
product. In this book we shall confine our scrutiny to the two more
controversial types of obsolescence creation—of quality and
desirability. We shall first take an over-all look at the evidence of the
use of obsolescence of quality as a strategy to promote sales. This type
of obsolescence—when deliberately planned—is certainly the most
dubious of all the types.
What is the state of the quality of consumer products in America
today? Obviously, in many fields, the quality is good. The makers of
men's socks should be applauded for greatly prolonging the life of their
product, often by combining nylon and wool. For most men, the
exasperation or embarrassment of finding a hole at the heel is becoming
a more and more infrequent occurrence. But in many other products
significant deterioration appears to have set in, and often by intent. At
this point two comments by experts might be noted. The first witness is
Gordon Lippincott, one of the nation's leading industrial designers. Mr.
Lippincott, co-chief of the firm of Lippincott & Margulies, stated in
1958: "Manufacturers have downgraded quality and upgraded
complexity. The poor consumer is going crazy."
The other witness is Colston E. Warne, president of Consumers
Union, the world's foremost nonprofit product-testing organization. At
approximately the same time that Mr. Lippincott spoke out, Mr. Warne
expressed his concern about the emphasis developing in recent years on
"hidden quality debasement," "built-in obsolescence," and a "growing
disregard" for maintaining quality levels.
In addition to having obsolescence deliberately built into it to
shorten its life, a product may be shoddy for a number of reasons. The
shoddiness may be due to haste caused by the strain of bringing out a
new model every year. It may be caused by skimping on the product
itself in order to feed advertising and sales costs. Or it can be caused by
just plain corner-cutting. The point to remember, however, is that all
these forms of shoddiness aid in producing obsolescence in the product,
and the obsolescence puts the owner into the market for a replacement.
If the debasement of the product is not obvious to the owner, or if he
has low expectations, there is no serious complication in selling him a
replacement. On the other hand, if the debasement becomes
conspicuous, the seller is in trouble.
Businessmen over the years have developed a variety of phrases to
describe that critical point when their product will, or is likely to,
collapse. They speak of "the point of required utility," of "time to
failure," or "product death date." Establishing the probable lifetime of a
product is not too difficult. Often you can do it by determining the life
span of its weakest link. The life of a product tends to be as long as that
link, especially if that link is difficult to replace. Oliver Wendell
Holmes anticipated the work of modern design engineers when he wrote
of that wonderful one-hoss shay which was built in such a logical way
that on a given day "it went to pieces all at once."
Even the best of products, of course, wears out sometime. Therefore
a company cannot be legitimately criticized for estimating the death
date of its product. It is vulnerable to criticism, however, if it sells a
product with a short life expectancy when it knows that for the same
cost, or only a little more, it could give the customer a product with a
much longer useful life. In such situations one may properly wonder
about the company's motives.
I should stress that all which follows here does not change the fact
that many hundreds of American companies still do their very best to
give their buyers a long-lasting product, especially in fields not heavily
dependent upon replacement sales.
The idea of creating obsolescence of quality through material failure
is not a new concept. In the late twenties, Advertising & Selling carried
a statement by J. George Frederick on the problem of increasing
consumption. He dismissed as a "mere minor stopgap" the proposals of
political liberals that more money be put into consumers' hands. A far
more powerful lever, he said, was the "principle" for which he had
dreamed up the name "progressive obsolescence." This simply meant
indoctrinating the people who do have spending money with the habit
of "buying more goods on the basis of obsolescence in efficiency,
economy, style, or taste."
Obsolescence planning was spelled out much more bluntly—and
specifically in terms of quality—a few years later in a speculative
article entitled "Outmoded Durability" in Printers' Ink (January 9,
1936). Its author was Leon Kelley, identified as an executive of Fishier,
Zealand & Co. The article's subtitle was: "If Merchandise Does Not
Wear Out Faster, Factories Will Be Idle, People Unemployed."
Mr. Kelley explained that man traditionally has cherished the notion
that durability is a prime feature of merit in products and that the longer
a thing lasts the more completely you realize a return on the money you
paid for it. He cited the grandfather's clock that had been in his family
for two hundred years and still worked fine. Advertisers, he said, have
tended to stress durability of their product as a major feature.
This harping on durability, he said, was out of date and should stop.
It didn't meet the needs of the times. To illustrate those new needs, he
cited a radio repairman who berated him because he still had the same
radio after six years, even though "it functions better than ever." The
radio man complained, "The trouble with this country is we expect
things to last too long. If you're a good 100 per cent American, you
ought to buy a new radio!" Kelley also cited a department-store
executive who told him that if everyone insisted on long wear there
would be few repeat sales.
Next, Mr. Kelley mentioned a survey that had been made of the
attitudes of men in the home-furnishing field toward durability in
collapsible portable chairs. It was found that nine out of ten experts
preferred a chair selling at $1.00, capable of serving the customer
approximately one year, to a chair that would cost $1.25, which might
well last for about five years.
He concluded that United States marketers faced the task of selling
the public away from the deep-rooted idea it had about durability. It
could be done, he suggested, either by soft-pedaling durability or by
deliberately promoting the idea of "non-durability." He worried whether
such a campaign would have unanimous support of the marketers. "Will
a few chiselers undercut the majority by screaming 'durability' to the
public in spite of the general campaign?" he asked. In any case, he
concluded that a trend away from durability had set in and would
proceed with "gathering momentum." He said that it would take hard
work and study to find the "right answers" to the many complex
questions that are raised by this trend.
Meanwhile, there was evidence that some companies already were
giving thought to modifying the expected lifetime of their products.
Certain practices of General Electric came to light during a United
States government suit involving General Electric's international
agreements in the late thirties.1 It should be stressed that the incidents
that follow occurred during the thirties, when General Electric was
under different management from what it is today.
In one memorandum introduced as an exhibit during the proceeding,
a company engineer outlined to his superior a program for increasing
sales by increasing the efficiency and shortening the life of flashlight
lamps. He pointed out that progress already was being made. Originally
the flashlight lamps outlasted three batteries. Then they were made to
last only through two batteries. And now he was proposing that the
lamp life be adjusted to last through one battery. "If this is done," he
pointed out, "we estimate that it would result in increasing our flashlight
business approximately 60 per cent." Another exhibit contained a
message that a General Electric official wrote to an official of the
Champion Lamp Works notifying him of a decision "to change the life
of the 200-watt 110-120 volt PS 30 bulb lamp from 1,000 hours . . . to
750 hours." He added, "We are giving no publicity whatever to the fact
that the change is contemplated."
And again, in 1939, an exhibit showed a General Electric official
wrote to one of the company's licensees, Tung-Sol Lamp Works,
notifying Tung-Sol of the following approved change: "The design life
of the 2330 Lamp has been changed from 300 back to 200 hours. . . . It
is understood that no publicity or other announcement will be made of
the change."
In the case of lamps it can be argued that one way to increase a
bulb's burning efficiency is to shorten its life. (Another way is to
increase the quality of materials and the workmanship.) It seems
apparent, however, that officials in the cases cited were motivated not
only by a desire for greater lamp-burning efficiency but also, quite
possibly, by a desire to promote the sale of replacements. A letter was
introduced in which a General Electric official pointed out that the
customer "is prone to judge quality by life alone." And he added: "We
realize that the constant reduction of lamp life that we have been in the
process of carrying on has kept the volume of business up, but cannot
refrain from giving a word of warning and a suggestion that it is about
time to call a halt on this in view of the competitive situation."
Automotive designers, too, were apparently becoming intrigued by
the possibility of practicing death control on their products. In 1934,
two different issues of the Journal of the Society of Automotive
Engineers quoted speculative comments by speakers at recent S.A.E.
meetings. One stressed the "desirability of building automobiles with a
limited life." Another suggested that all the parts of trucks might be
designed for "controllable wear" as well as imperceptible wear.
The war years temporarily eased the "gathering momentum" away
from durability noted by Mr. Kelley. But by the fifties the problem of
mounting productivity of consumer goods was again bearing down
upon producers. Many of their marketers began talking uneasily about
the need for more obsolescence. And business journals pondered the
problems involved. The February, 1959, issue of Dun's Review and
Modern Industry carried an article by Martin Mayer, author of Madison
Avenue, U.S.A. It was entitled: "Planned Obsolescence: Rx for Tired
Markets?"
Mayer noted one of the discouraging facts in a manufacturer's life
when he observed: "The more durable the item, the more slowly it will
be consumed." He suggested that manufacturers could make some
headway against this dilemma by making the older product seem
obsolete (by creating obsolescence of material, function, or style). "The
trick isn't foolproof," he warned, "but it ought to work a good part of the
time—and perhaps can even be planned, assuring the manufacturer of a
large, steadily increasing replacement market." Mayer observed that
once the matter of subjective judgment is put aside, "it is clear that a
pattern of successful style obsolescence must eventually be reinforced
by a decrease in the durability of the product."
A number of designing engineers entrusted with shaping United
States products meanwhile began showing acute cases of guilty
conscience about some of the things they were expected to do. After all,
they hadn't been taught during their idealistic days back in college how
to build products that would fall apart after an appropriate period of
service.
When members of the American Society of Industrial Designers
met in the mid-fifties, Harvard Professor and Brigadier General George
F. Doriot gave them something to chew on by chiding them because of
the quality of their products. He told of his own sad experiences as the
owner of an electric range that required servicing every six months, an
electric hot-water heater that flooded his basement, and a washing
machine that jumped and ran around. Professor Doriot charged:
"You have been called upon to put a varnish of appearance and
attractiveness on things that are going down badly. . . . You are
increasing the cost of things and their service. I call that cheapening
design, and you will eventually lose your reputation."
The engineering journals uneasily mulled the pros and cons of
planned obsolescence through materials failure. In April, 1956,
Electrical Manufacturing ran a think piece called "Design for Planned
Obsolescence." It said that the "lifetime" guarantee, once a potent sales
appeal, was losing its charm as restless Americans faced with the need
of an expanding economy were in a mood to accept planned
obsolescence. "The hard logic of our national economy," it said, "would
support the need for a broad policy of planned obsolescence in order to
take the maximum advantage of our potential for productivity and
technological progress."
What does this mean, it asked, "to those men who are responsible
for the design engineering of these products? First of all, it means that
design for planned obsolescence becomes a legitimate objective." It
added that the customer today "will readily purchase an appliance say to
serve him no more than two or three or five years, to be replaced at that
time by a newer and presumably better model. But he will not accept
this limited life for the appliance if he is to be burdened with service
and maintenance problems and costs during the same period."
It suggested that "civilian" products should be designed the way
military products are designed: for "a reasonably short life span" but for
dependability during that short life.
Another journal which anguished over the problem of obsolescence,
and more critically, was Product Engineering. Its editor charged: "The
doctrine of 'planned obsolescence' is carried so far that the product can
scarcely hold together for shipment. And maintenance is so difficult and
unreliable that replacement is easier."
A reader of this journal protested planned obsolescence and offered
a really drastic proposal. He wrote: "Let's stop all this researching and
developing for a while! We're up to our glasses in 'progress' now. . . .
We are inundating ourselves with junk. Science devises junk; industry
mass-produces it; business peddles it; advertising conditions our
reflexes to reach for the big red box of it. To be sure, we are skilled
junkmen—but what of us? How far have we advanced? We are junkoriented cavemen!"
The most agonizing soul-searching, however, took place in the
pages of Design News, a journal for "Product Designers and
Engineering Management" during late 1958 and early 1959. And in the
process a lot of cats came out of bags. It began when the editorial
director, E. S. Safford, offered an editorial entitled: "Product DeathDates—A Desirable Concept?"
Mr. Safford got right down to cases. "It is of marked interest to
learn from a highly placed engineer in a prominent portable-radio
manufacturing company," he began, that his product is designed to last
not more than three years.
"Is purposeful design for product failure unethical? The particular
engineer in question stoutly defends his company's design philosophy in
two ways: first, if portable radios characteristically lasted ten years, the
market might be saturated long before repeat sales could support
continued volume manufacturing . . .; second, the user would be denied
benefits of accelerated progress if long life is a product characteristic."
The editor's informant went on to explain that it takes sales to get
money in order to develop "better" performance, "better" styling, and
"better" prices for products.
Editor Safford conceded that the consumer's "ten-year investment in
portable radios was substantially higher than it would have been had his
first radio lasted." But this "force feeding" of the consumer, the editor
continued, had "contributed to progress." The contribution? The
consumer had paid out over a ten-year period "three times the amount
he would have voluntarily spent for this product—if the product had not
been designed for short-term existence." How all this "progress" was
producing a "better" price or "better" performance for the product was
never quite made clear.
"Should engineers resist such a philosophy" if their management
specified that it wanted a "short-term product"? Editorial Director
Safford did not think they should. He said, "Planned existence spans of
product may well become one of the greatest economic boosts to the
American economy since the origination of time payments.
"Such a philosophy," he continued, "demands a new look at old
engineering ethics. Respected engineers have long sought to build the
best, or the lightest, or the fastest, or at the lowest cost—but few have
been called upon to provide all of this with a predetermined life span.
"It is very possible that a new factor is entering the economic scene,
through the skill of the engineer. This factor is Time, in a new costume,
requiring new techniques, new concepts—perhaps new ethics.
"Is this concept bad? We don't think so. Progress in science is
accelerating at an exponential rate, and the beneficiaries should be the
underwriters."
This call for a re-examination of "old ethics" and the development
of "perhaps new ethics" which would countenance death-dating of
products hit some raw nerves and brought down a squall of comments
on the editor's head.
Reactions came from all over the nation and from engineers and
executives working with both large and small companies. (Some of the
larger: Whirlpool Corporation, Remington Rand, General Electric, and
Fairchild Aircraft & Missiles.) The General Electric man disagreed "in
principle" with the editorial but liked it and called it "quite stimulating."
On the other hand, the Remington Rand man expressed extreme
annoyance. Another engineer congratulated the magazine for raising
"this tremendously significant and important subject of product death
rates. Whether desirable or not, everyone knows that the concept of
limited-life product exists."
Several of the letter writers offered cautious agreement with the
thesis of the editorial. They tended to take a let's-be-realis-tic attitude.
The Fairchild man thought it "unfortunate" that the nasty phrase
"planned obsolescence" had been hung on a type of engineering that "is
practiced by nearly all design groups, in all fields, under the guise of
economy or efficiency." In designing airplanes, he pointed out, "it is
essential that the component or structure which has the least (but
acceptable) expected service-life be used as the criterion against which
the service life expectancy of every other component is judged. This
may be termed 'planned obsolescence' or it may with equal honesty be
termed 'Efficient Design.' In short it is wasteful to make any component
more durable than the weakest link, and ideally a product should fall
apart all at once. . . ."
The Whirlpool engineer-executive likewise made the point that
"without a design-life goal, some parts of the product might last far
longer than others and incur a needless cost penalty in the process.
Setting the actual design-life objective is certainly a policy issue faced
by a company's top management. . . . It would undoubtedly vary from
one product to another and perhaps be reviewed and changed from time
to time as economic or other conditions change. In my experience, a
tenor fifteen-year design-life goal is much more common than the threeyear life mentioned for one product."
A reader might wonder why a product's life expectancy should
change simply because "economic or other conditions" change.
Another let's-be-sensible letter writer pointed out that a major
electrical company builds industrial fluorescent light bulbs so that all
bulbs burn out at approximately the same time. "This makes it
economically practical to change all the bulbs in one area of a building
just before they burn out. It seems to me that we could use a lot more of
this type of research."
The majority of the engineers and executives reacting to the
editorial, however, seemed angry and bewildered. They appeared to
have little enthusiasm for the "new ethics" they were being invited to
explore. One said he was "shocked." Another said, "I boiled." A third
snorted, "Ridiculous." A fourth called planned obsolescence "a
spreading infection." A fifth said, "It is pretty sad when not only
manufacturers but a nationally circulated magazine such as Design
News takes a 'customer be damned' attitude." A sixth suggested, "It is
even a crime against the natural law of God in that we would waste that
which He has given us." And a seventh—an engineer of the Itek
Corporation—sneered, "Please—let 'em last at least as long as the
installments! Which they often don't."
The objections to designing death dates into products were
primarily three:
1. Death-dating might give engineering a black eye. Jack Waldheim
of Milwaukee—who, when the going got hot, was invited to write a
"guest editorial"—said, "Such sophism on the part of the spokesmen for
our profession can kill with distrust the public respect for our skill. . . .
We [would be] placing ourselves in the position of expertly skilled con
men."
2. Death-dating would stultify imagination and creative ability.
Arnold Johnson of Loewy Hydropress complained that the United
States appeared to be turning "its engineers into destroyers; destroyers
of their own creativity to satisfy the market. This surely will lead to the
destruction of the engineers' ability to create."
3. Death-dating was cheating the customers out of hard-earned
money. Harold L. Chambers of Remington Rand observed: "I greatly
doubt that any one of us [designers] would wish to apply this 'principle'
of planned short-term failure to his own purchases of home, auto, piano,
and other durable goods involving considerable expense. Why, then,
support pressing this principle on 'someone else'?" Another letter writer
wondered how the death-date planners themselves would like to find
they had bought a pencil with one-fourth inch of lead in it.
Several expressed the opinion that if engineers did engage in
designing products for a given life expectancy, then ethics should
compel them to insist that those death dates be printed on the product.
One was not optimistic that sales departments would permit that.
Managements might fear, he said, that such information would be
"misunderstood" by consumers.
CHAPTER 7
Planned Obsolescence of
Desirability
"Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it
every six months."—OSCAR WILDE
THE TECHNIQUE OF MAKING PRODUCTS OBSOLETE BY DESIGNING THEM
to wear out or to look shoddy after a few years has limited utility. This
limit on the usefulness of planned quality obsolescence inspired
marketers to search also for other ways to render existing products
obsolete. The safer, more widely applicable approach, many soon
concluded, was to wear the product out in the owner's mind. Strip it of
its desirability even though it continues to function dutifully. Make it
old-fashioned, conspicuously non-"modern." As Paul Mazur pointed
out, "Style can destroy completely the value of possessions even while
their utility remains unimpaired."
Ideally, of course, it would be most satisfying to create this
obsolescence in the mind by bringing out a substantially better
functioning product. But in fast-paced modern marketing there is very
often little new, basically, that can be offered. The manufacturer can't
wait for the slow workings of functional obsolescence to produce
something really better. Or he feels he can't. So he sets out to offer
something new anyhow, and hopes that the public will equate newness
with betterness. Fortunately for him, mid-century Americans are prone
to accept that equation. The challenge in using this second form of
obsolescence creation as a strategy is to persuade the public that style is
an important element in the desirability of one's product. Once that
premise is accepted, you can create obsolescence-in-the-mind merely by
shifting to another style. Sometimes this obsolescence of desirability is
called "psychological obsolescence." Designer George Nelson bluntly
summed up the challenge of producing the appearance of change when
he stated, in Industrial Design: "Design . . . is an attempt to make a
contribution through change. When no contribution is made or can be
made, the only process available for giving the illusion of change is
'styling.' In a society so totally committed to change as our own, the
illusion must be provided for the customers if the reality is not
available."
Market researcher Louis Cheskin of the Color Research Institute is
another knowledgeable observer who spoke frankly of the lack of
significant improvement in United States products. He explained: "Most
design changes are made not for improving the product, either
esthetically or functionally, but for making it obsolete." Mr. Cheskin
made what he felt was an important distinction between planned
obsolescence of quality and planned obsolescence of desirability as far
as conscience is concerned. He frowned on planned obsolescence of
quality as antisocial and also dangerous. "We know a company," he
continued, "that actually produced a product for the home to break
down in two to three years. It broke down in less than a year. That was
bad for the company."
On the other hand, he contended that planned obsolescence of
desirability—or "psychological obsolescence"—was "socially
justifiable because it redistributes wealth."
Industrial designer J. Gordon Lippincott, on the other hand,
appeared less certain of the justification of planning obsolescence
through such devices as the annual model change. "Industrial designers
today," he said, "have become commercial artists rearranging a lot of
spinach to come up with a new model. If we eliminate yearly models,
we put a premium on better design. If you're going to live with
something a long time, it has to be designed more subtly." In contrast,
he said, contemporary gaudy styling "loses its glamour only one notch
slower than a streetwalker at dawning."
All the emphasis on style tends to cause the product designers and
public alike to be preoccupied with the appearances of change rather
than the real values involved, and also tends to force more and more
extravagance in the design as the designers grope for novelty. The
famed Parisian couturier of the twenties, Paul Poiret, observed: "All
fashion ends in excess." In countries such as Switzerland, where
designers must still produce forms that are not quickly dated, they shun
the excessive use of ornamentation or abstract form.
A producer of products can bring about a pronounced style change
in several ways. For example:
He can change the predominant color used. In the late fifties, a great
deal of work was done to groom colors for future leadership. In some
instances, the "color forecasting" done by industry consultants strongly
suggested collaboration if not conspiracy. Consumer Reports related, in
the late fifties, the success that color consultants for a leading plastics
producer had been having. In 1955, the consultants had "forecast that
pink would be the leading color. It was. In 1956, turquoise was the
predicted leader. It was. This year the prediction was lemon yellow,"
and it added that if the sale of lemon-yellow baby bathtubs,
wastebaskets, bowls, and such could be trusted, then the forecasters
were again right on top of the trend.
The producer can change the degree of ornamentation, as from
severely plain to gaudy or ornate. A prototype for this kind of change
was offered by the classic Greek columns, which evolved from the
simple Doric through the slender, ornamented Ionic, to the excessively
ornamented Corinthian. Or to take another classic model, after the
Middle Ages the style of buildings and their furnishings moved from
the bold, crude, clean-lined Renaissance style to baroque, characterized
by elegant curves, and then on to rococo, with its fantastic mass of
curlicues. These changes took centuries and evolved normally. Modern
designers began striving to propel the public through comparable
swings of style for their particular products within the span of a few
years.
Or, finally, the producer can change the profile, as when he moves
the tail fin or hemline up or down, or changes his basic emphasis from
vertical to horizontal lines.
In the fifties, designers in a great many fields earnestly studied the
obsolescence-creating techniques pioneered in the field of clothing and
accessories, particularly those for women. Women's clothing and
accessories, by 1960, had become a twelve-billion-dollar industry,
much of it created by obsolescence planning. As Mr. Cheskin observed:
"Every industry tries to emulate the women's fashion industry. This is
the key to modern marketing."
The women's fashion field was ideal for leading the way in planned
obsolescence of desirability because here psychological wants have
been most rampant. Heine noted long ago that "when a woman begins
to think, her first thought is of a new dress." For centuries women have
craved for an excuse for a new dress, and so have become coconspirators with the dress marketers. Only those women in the very
lowest and very highest social classes in the United States have actually
come close to wearing out their dresses in recent years.
When a woman already has a closetful of good-as-new dresses, the
best excuse she can offer her husband (who usually considers himself
financially hard-pressed) for further splurging is that every dress she
owns is out of style. In recent years the dressmakers have stepped up the
pace of style obsolescence, so that by 1960 fashion ran through a full
cycle every seven to ten years. Women's suits were following a fairly
tight ten-year cycle. The seven-to-ten-year cycle was acknowledged by
style consultant Tobé, who is as close as anyone to being the dictator of
style in the United States. Thousands of women's-wear stores depend
upon her for guidance.
As early as the thirties, an executive of Filene's in Boston was
calling for the creation of more obsolescence in women's clothing "to
take up the slack." The most forthright statement of the widely felt need
for stepped-up obsolescence of style was made in 1950 to several
hundred fashion experts meeting in Manhattan. The speaker was B. Earl
Puckett, chairman of Allied Stores Corporation. Basic utility, he said,
"cannot be the foundation of a prosperous apparel industry. . . . We
must accelerate obsolescence. . . . It is our job to make women unhappy
with what they have. . . . We must make them so unhappy that their
husbands can find no happiness or peace in their excessive savings."
And the following year, Alfred Daniels, merchandising executive
for New York's Abraham & Straus, confided to businessmen in The
Harvard Business Review that he had learned to promote, more or less
continuously, new things for women. "Anything new," he said, just as
long as it was in fair taste. In the trade, he said, this was called "running
up and down stairs."
The trick, he explained, was to "get a lot of fashion cycles working"
within the general trend, which some say is more difficult to
manipulate. As an example he explained that there may be an "Oriental
influence" taking place within the general trend in apparel design for
women. The fashion merchant will know about this trend, but "he
doesn't need to know how it came about. If he is curious he can call up
some fashion expert, who may tell him it is a result of pressure by
Mongolian idiots." Mr. Daniels added with no evident regret: "Today
the fashion cycle moves so quickly it is a blur."
As for the practice of taking the hemline up and down, it is
somewhat more difficult to create obsolescence by taking the hemline
up than it is by lowering it. When you are going upward with the
hemline, women who are durability-minded or who have stubborn
husbands may get out their shears and each season take an inch or so off
the bottom of their skirts. To cope with this tendency, a New York
fashion advertiser explained to me, you need to do something else while
you are raising the hemline. So you widen the waist. Thus American
women had the "sack" look—or the chemise—while the hemline was
being raised for them in the mid-fifties. Once the designers had reached
the maximum height that decency permitted, they ameliorated the
ghastly sack look by moving into the high-waisted "Empire" style and
then started the hemline down again. And from the high-waisted Empire
they quickly moved to the low-waisted look. Meanwhile, designers
were broadening the shoulders to create obsolescence. Since shoulders
had been narrow, with little material available, there wasn't much that a
woman could do to fix over her existing dresses.
Bathing-suit makers had a somewhat different way of creating
obsolescence. A buyer for Dallas' Neiman-Marcus explained why the
bikini would be the big item for 1960: "The well-traveled waistline has
been going up and down since fashion de-emphasized the bosom, and
the spotlight is now on the navel."
Women's shoemakers meanwhile were creating not only
obsolescence but havoc by promoting the pointed-toe shoe with its
accompanying manifestation, the spike heel. The pointed toe was
deplored by doctors and the pin-point heel by the National Safety
Council. An Oklahoma scientist has calculated that the spiked heel
gives the woman's weight a focused impact equivalent to that of an
elephant for a given spot hit by the heel. Tile floors began breaking up
under the impact across the nation.
It might be noted that considerable success was also being achieved
in creating obsolescence in the engagement and wedding rings that
lovers give their betrothed. Old-fashioned people might still hold to the
idea that such rings should be cherished till death parts the couple. But
credit jewelers had different ideas and succeeded in persuading
hundreds of thousands of married women to trade in their "old rings for
new-styled ones."
Cosmetic makers, too, were busily introducing style concepts in
their selling. One of the secrets of the success of Charles Rev-son,
founder of Revlon, was that he brought fashion to nail polish with
widely publicized changes of styles in shading every six months. The
shades he unveiled every six months made his old shades obsolete. At
one early stage, for example, he sold women on boldness in nail
enamel, then subsequently unsold them on bold in favor of muted
enamel.
Mr. Revson once explained to me: "Women can take to new things
faster than men do. That spells opportunity to you." He said with some
scorn that men are more stubborn about accepting style changes. Men
have been the despair of aggressive marketers as they have, in vast
numbers, dropped vests and hats and have insisted on wearing their
shoes until they are literally worn out.
Now, the men's apparel industry has moved rather spectacularly to
try to copy the obsoleting techniques used so successfully in women's
apparel. The promoters of style swings for men had far to go to match
the style change every three months achieved in the women's fashion
field, but they had succeeded in achieving a major change for men once
a year. It used to take four or five years to see a major change.
The growing preoccupation of the makers of men's wear with
"forced" obsolescence was revealed in a report on the forty-first
convention of the National Association of Retail Clothiers and
Furnishers in 1959. It said: "Although only one speaker brought the
subject into the open, forced obsolescence in men's clothing and
accessories was a behind-the-scene issue. . . . Several representatives of
clothing manufacturers suggested their industry could profitably follow
the lead of the women's-wear industry and create obsolescence by more
frequent style changes." 1 A few months later, the president of the
Reliance Manufacturing Company, in a talk to his salesmen, stated that
the "demands" of style obsolescence had become "the major marketing
trend in men's wear today."
In fast succession during the mid- and late fifties and early sixties,
men were led through the gray-flannel-suit phase, to the charcoal gray,
to the Ivy League look, to the cutaway-style Continental look. Ties and
lapels became visibly narrower, collars stubbier. Padded shoulders
disappeared, as did the loose-falling jacket. An analyst for The New
York Times concluded that by 1960 "a man wearing a suit and
furnishings produced a decade ago would appear completely out of
style."
One afternoon recently, your author had to buy a hat and raincoat.
At the store where the raincoat was to be bought, the clerk purred:
"Would you like the short new length, or the old regular length?" (I took
the "old regular.") And at the hat store the clerk tried to explain to me:
"Hat brims are shorter this year." A few days later, I read a statement by
the president of the Hat Corporation of America, who said: "To make
men part with their money, the only thing to sell is fashion. . . . We've
got to keep them busy changing their hats."
Men's shoes, too, were finally being planned for obsolescence. The
Journal of Commerce quoted shoe manufacturers as stating that "we
will be making shoes for men, women, and youngsters so distinctive
that anyone who clings to the old styles will be conspicuous." Low-cut
brogues were being replaced by tapered high risers. The aim was to
provide what the manufacturers called their first obsolescence factor in
thirty years.
The Leather Industries of America, in fact, began a national
campaign to persuade women to buy shoes as gifts for their husbands.
Its director agreed that up until recently such a notion in gift-giving
would have been inconceivable because men's shoes were "dull." But he
added: "Today, men's shoes rival women's in fashion changes. A
woman can be convinced that her husband is badly dressed if he wears
conventional shoes all the time."
In 1960, the head of the House of Worsted-Tex, one of the nation's
largest makers of men's clothing, happily reported that men had been
given an entirely different look in a mere five years. He said, "They no
longer want just a suit. They want a certain look of elegance, smartness,
and success." He added that with the rapid acceleration of new models
the industry was finally achieving the style obsolescence it had so long
sought. And he concluded that the industry should be prepared to accept
the increased costs "that go with such comparatively rapid style
changes." Apparently, at least some of these costs were to be passed
along to the consumer. The price of suits went up an average of five
dollars within a year.
Even pre-teen boys' shoes were slated for obsoleting. They were
being designed away from their "sexless" look to a "real nervous" look
of flashy casualness. Meanwhile, the obsolescence planners were going
to work on children's clothing. Women's Wear Daily 2 counted up three
factors working to assist the marketers of children's wear at back-toschool season. Factor One was the growing birth rate. Factor Two was
the fact that "children still outgrow their clothes." Factor Three was "the
advantage of styling obsolescence." The last factor, the journal said,
"must be dramatized, utilized, and publicized for all it's worth." And
marketers "must pull out all stops."
Quite possibly the recent mood of the American people encouraged
the promotion of forced obsolescence of desirability in a variety of
fields. Louis Cheskin suggests that psychological obsolescence is a
symptom of our times related to the prevalence of "boredom, lack of
self-expression, absence of free and truly friendly communication
between neighbors and friends, and a general lack of rational values."
The Chicago Tribune's market researchers in their studies of the
people in the teeming suburbs found that "the inhabitants of new
Suburbia are vitally concerned with taste and style." And housing
consultant Stanley Edge observes that the new suburbanites "want to go
along with the rest of the crowd."
On the other hand, the idea of promoting style obsolescence
regardless of the public's particular mood undoubtedly struck some
hardheaded manufacturers as dictated by logic. Periodic style changes
in a product not only create new potential customers but put the nation's
merchants on the spot to increase their sales of the product in question.
The restyled product can have the effect of stimulating the dealers by
persuading them that they have something new to sell. Also, periodic
style changes enable the manufacturers to keep closer control over the
sales quotas of their dealers and to force the dealers to launch crashselling campaigns to clear out their back rooms of old models during the
last weeks before the new models are introduced.
For all these reasons the techniques of forced obsolescence of
desirability pioneered in the apparel field were soon widely copied by
the makers of an astonishing variety of goods, hard and soft.
We have, then, two controversial marketing strategies based on the
creation of obsolescence. One is the creation of obsolescence of quality.
The other is the creation of obsolescence of desirability. (In addition,
there is the obsolescence created by genuine gain in function, which, as
noted, we all applaud.)
Let us now look at two fields where the two controversial forms of
obsolescence creation have been most energetically attempted. One is in
the home and its furnishings. The other is in the motorcar industry. We
will consider the motorcar industry first, since this industry is widely
regarded as the keystone of the American industrial economy, and since
literally billions of dollars a year are spent in obsolescence creation,
particularly of desirability.
CHAPTER 8
How to Outmode a $4,000
Vehicle in Two Years
"One of the strangest, yet best recognized, secrets of Detroit is
'planned obsolescence'—a new model every year."—BUSINESS
WEEK.
AN AUTO-PARTS DEALER IN SPRINGFIELD, ILLINOIS, OFFERED ME THE
opinion that as far as he could figure the United States motorcar had
become "a women's fashion item." And an advertising executive
working on a motorcar account confessed: "You want to know what
sells cars today? It's style, period!" The advertisements certainly seemed
to spell out his conviction. Some samples:
Ford: "Nothing Newer in THE WORLD OF STYLE"—or later, "Vogue
magazine says Ford is a Fashion Success."
Chevrolet: "Styling That Sets a New Style"
De Soto: "Best Dressed Car of the Year"
Oldsmobile: "Start of a New Styling Cycle."
When the new 1960 Pontiac was unveiled, The New York Times
described its sculptured lines—"a horizontal V front"—and added this
observation: "Emphasis is almost entirely on styling, for there are no
major mechanical changes."
The automobile industry was the first major group to become
fascinated with the increased sales that might be achieved by imitating
the women's-fashion stylists. Decades ago, General Motors took the
automotive leadership from Henry Ford I by successfully insisting that
competition be on the basis of styling rather than pricing. Mr. Ford in
fifteen years had brought the price of his Model T motorcar down from
$780 to $290, by sticking to a basic design except for minor changes.
Such fanatical dedication to the ideal of an ever-lower price tag made
competition on the basis of price most unattractive. Competitors such as
General Motors did not relish trying to match Old Henry in either
production know-how or pricing, so they emphasized a yearly change
and a variety to choose from.
In the twenties and thirties, significant technological innovations
such as balloon tires, shock absorbers, and four-wheel brakes were
available almost every year to captivate the public. By the early fifties,
however, the automobile industry was finding itself with fewer and
fewer significant technological improvements that it felt were feasible
to offer the public. Consequently, at all the major automotive
headquarters—Ford now included—more and more dependence was
placed on styling. One aim was to create through styling "dynamic
obsolescence," to use the phrase of the chief of General Motors styling,
Harley Earl. The motorcar makers began "running up and down stairs,"
as fashion merchandiser Alfred Daniels put it.
"New" became the key word as the manufacturers sought to make
car owners feel like old fuds in any vehicle more than two years old.
When the 1957 motorcars were launched, Chrysler revealed that it had
"The Newest New Cars in 20 Years." Nash had "The World's Newest . .
. Car." And Pontiac was "Completely New From Power to Personality."
A columnist for Advertising Age noted that Buick—which he called the
least changed of the new models—had used the word "new" twenty
times in an advertisement. He added: "We find it difficult to assume that
such complete and utter nonsense is justified by the need to sell
7,000,000 cars in 1957. If our national prosperity is to be founded on
such fanciful, fairyland stuff as this, how real and tangible can our
prosperity be?"
That, indeed, seemed a fair question. And glory be to an
advertising-industry man for raising it!
The intensified preoccupation with obsolescence-through-styling
brought new power to the automobile stylists and more than a little
grumbling from engineers, who felt they were receiving less and less
attention when it came to fixing the format of automobiles. General
Motors' Mr. Earl defined the stylist, incidentally, as "a man who is
dissatisfied with everything." At Ford, styling was taken away from
engineering and made a separate department. The $200,000-a-year head
of this styling department, George W. Walker—"the Cellini of
Chrome"—was at one time a stylist for women's clothing. When the
1958 models were launched, he frankly conceded that he designed his
cars primarily for women. "They are naturally style conscious," he said,
and even though they may not drive the car in many cases they seem to
have a major say in the choice of a new car.
When the president of General Motors found himself testifying
before a Senate subcommittee in the late fifties, he alluded to the
"application of fancification to our automobiles." At another sitting he
said, "Styling has become increasingly important in determining the
share of the market."
Let us pause and examine in some detail just how "fancification"
and other styling devices were systematized to produce obsolescence of
desirability in the traveling machines made in the United States.
To comprehend the strategic mapping going on behind all the
commotion about styling, we need first of all to understand the shell
game Detroit plays with the public. The body shell is crucial to
obsolescence planning. If motorcar salesmen had their way, automobile
makers would issue a vehicle that at least looks brand new each year or
half year. Unfortunately for them, it costs many, many millions of
dollars for retooling to overhaul a motorcar's physical form in any
fundamental way. Consequently, even in seeking the superficial outer
appearances of change, the motorcar makers have depended to a large
extent upon illusion created by changes of decoration rather than of the
body shell.
As recently as 1956, the Detroit motorcar makers customarily made
a major overhaul in their shell only every third year. During the two
intervening annual models they simply rejiggered grilles, lights,
fenders, and so on. By 1957, the industry was heading toward an
overhaul of the shell every second year. One year was becoming known
as the year for "basic" change and the other the year for the "trim"
change.
And by 1958, insiders were whispering the news—stunning to
competitors—that General Motors was going to overhaul the shells of
its five motorcars every single year. Each car was to be a new car each
year. General Motors was able to achieve this break-through by an
interesting expedient made possible by its gargantuan size. It chose to
create a new look for its five cars each year by sacrificing some of the
distinctiveness in the appearance of each of the five, Chevrolet, Pontiac,
Oldsmobile, Buick, Cadillac. (This was before the compacts.) In short,
all General Motors cars would bear more than a little family
resemblance. The bold decision was made to bring out a brand-new
shell each year and to use it for all five cars. Almost all models of all
five cars each year would have substantially the same body. The basic
body shell was to be stretched amidship about three inches for some of
the big Cadillacs and Buicks. Later, there were reports that the three
"luxury" compacts, which General Motors began unveiling in late 1960,
would also have their own common body shell.
When General Motors' five standard-size cars for 1959 were
unveiled, Joseph Callahan, the engineering editor of Automotive News,
reported that "at least 12 important stampings are identical on all 5
cars." 1 Among the twelve he mentioned were a number of door panels,
the upper back panel, three cowl panels.
"The big advantage of the common body," he explained, "is that the
manufacturer of a multiple line of cars can save some of the millions it
annually spends to create style obsolescence."
Obviously the major hazard in such an approach was the possible
appearance of sameness in all General Motors motorcars. Action was
taken to reduce this hazard by attaching different trimmings to the basic
shell. Strips of painted metal were attached to the doors to produce
distinctive sculptured looks. And Callahan added: "Differences also
were produced by using a variety of chrome trim, rear deck lids, quarter
panels, bumpers and bumper guards. Of course, many interchangeable
parts are reworked for different cars and models. Reworking is achieved
by changing the location of holes, making minor changes of shape,
attaching extra pieces, etc."
Automotive insiders began speculating—and still are—whether the
less gigantic Ford and Chrysler companies would be able to follow
General Motors' all-new-shell-every-year program. A Senate
subcommittee report on "Administered Prices" in the automobile field
expressed concern about General Motors' move. It stated: "General
Motors . . . alone has the financial resources to play this form of
nonprice competition to the full: all other companies have good cause to
be deeply alarmed over the future." 2
Meanwhile, advertising journals surmised that eventually the
automobile industry might be able to reach a new-car-every-six-months
cycle of innovation.
How could the stylists know what shell to use when they had to
design at least three years ahead of the car's unveiling? The styling
experts at General Motors held an advantage in trying to anticipate—
without exercising more than moderate clairvoyance—what shell or
silhouette was likely to be considered smart-looking by the public three
years hence. General Motors bought about half of all automobile
advertising. Since the silhouette had to be frozen so far in advance of
unveiling, General Motors was aided in securing a favorable response
from the public three years later by its superior image-building power.
As the Senate report pointed out: "Because of its great sales volume it
[General Motors] has an immense impact in framing consumer attitudes
toward style changes." During Senate hearings George Romney,
president of the then-small American Motors, which pioneered the
American-built compacts, testified to General Motors' power to mold
public taste when he talked about the wrap-around windshield—and the
"millinery" aspect of car making. He said that if a small company had
introduced the wrap-around, it probably would have been a flop. It took
a big company to swing it. Familiarity, he said, brings acceptance. Mr.
Romney then made this remarkable comment:
"Now, Senator, in this millinery aspect, in the fashion aspect, a
company doing 45 to 50 per cent of the business can make an aspect of
car appearance a necessary earmark of product acceptance by the public
just as a hat manufacturer—a woman's hat manufacturer—who sold 50
per cent of the hats would have a much easier time of making all other
hat manufacturers put cherries on their hats if the cherries were decided
by it to be the fashion note for this year." (Mr. Romney spent several
heartbreaking years trying to interest the American public in the
rationality of compacts and probably succeeded only because of the
dazzling logic of his case—and the fact that many American
sophisticates had turned to small foreign cars for relief from Detroit's
gaudy giantism. This made it psychologically safe for Americans to be
seen in small cars.)
During most of the fifties, the General Motors stylists decided that
the trend in silhouettes should be toward cars that were ever longer,
ever lower, and ever wilder at the extremities. By 1959, one automobile
executive was confessing: "In length we have hit the end of the
runway." A Chicago official estimated that just getting cars back to the
postwar length would release eight hundred miles of street space for
parking. There was no question, however, that millions of Americans
still wanted the biggest-looking car they could get, particularly if they
lived in wide-open areas where parking was not a serious and chronic
problem.
Detroit producers who tried to bring out cars that defied the
direction in styling General Motors had set—such as Chrysler in the
early fifties—were badly mauled.
By the late fifties, Poiret's law that all fashion ends in excess was
indubitably being demonstrated in the automotive field. The Big Three
stylists were speculating how many more inches they could lower the
silhouette before snapping human endurance and overstraining their
own ingenuity. A four-wheeled vehicle can be squashed only so far.
They used smaller wheels. They sacrificed rigidity. Some of them
spread the wheels still farther apart as the only way left to get the engine
lower. Meanwhile, the hump down the middle grew. The joke spread
that the front seat of the new wide, wide cars could hold two grownups
and a midget. One reason General Motors accepted the revolutionary
idea of putting a rear-end motor in its Corvair was that this helped solve
the hump problem.
As early as 1957, Automotive Industries reported that the low
silhouette had become so low that "many people feel we have reached
bottom." It added, however, "There is a feeling that stylists are aiming
even lower." The sight line of drivers had dropped nine inches below
the sight line of prewar autos. The following year, The Harvard
Business Review carried an illuminating paper on product styling by
Dwight E. Robinson, professor of business administration at the
University of Washington. His investigations had taken him, among
other places, to Detroit's secretive studios for styling. He reported:
"Stylists recognize that the extreme limits on lowness imposed by the
human physique are only a few inches away and [will] come close to
realization in the 1960 models."
By 1959, Pontiac's Bonneville hardtop stood just four and a half feet
high, a full foot lower than the Pontiac of a decade earlier. Some drivers
of late-model makes of cars—where seats were nearly a half foot closer
to the floor than they had been a decade earlier—reported they were
wearing bicycle clips to keep their pants cuffs from dragging on the
floor. People also began discovering that sitting in a low-seated car
throws more of the weight onto the end of the spine, a more tiring
position for long trips.
In July, 1959, The Wall Street Journal reported an astonishing
incident that indicated the style swing must certainly finally be
approaching its nadir. At General Motors' own annual meeting,
shareholders stood up and lamented their personal difficulties in trying
to work their bodies into late-model General Motors cars. One man
from New Jersey exclaimed, "I bumped my knee and my head getting
into" a 1959 Oldsmobile. He was received by a burst of applause. An
average-sized man from Massachusetts exclaimed that he found he
couldn't sit in a 1959 Buick with his hat on. And he added: "It's a
disgrace for a woman to have to get in and out of such low cars."
The reporter commented that General Motors' Chairman Frederic G.
Donner "listened impassively and without comment" to these laments.
Six months earlier, the same Mr. Donner was quoted in Sales
Management as supporting what it referred to as "artificial
obsolescence." Mr. Donner was reported stating, "If it had not been for
the annual model change, the automobile as we know it today would not
be produced in volume and would be priced so that relatively few could
afford to own one. Our customers would have no incentive or reason to
buy a new car until their old one wore out." He clearly was concerned
about giving car owners "an incentive or reason" to turn in their old cars
before they wore out physically.
Meanwhile, stylists were striving to justify the new low, low cars on
high philosophic or sound functional grounds. A Chrysler stylist told a
Detroit gathering of the Society of Automotive Engineers that the low
silhouette was all a part of a broad trend to the "low look" in
contemporary design. He cited everything from ranch houses to sofas.
Others cited the low center of gravity in the new cars as a great aid in
cornering. Actually, the banked curves of most of the recently built
highways made this a puny plus factor.
As for the trend to wildness at the extremities, this was evidently
related stylistically to squashing down the midsection. If you believed
the motorcar advertisements, you assumed there was sound functional
reason for the fantastic outcropping of tail fins on motorcars in the late
fifties. The fins were said to stabilize a moving car in a crosswind.
Professor Robinson commented: "I found few designers in Detroit
willing to say there is much scientific support for these claims."
Instead, Professor Robinson concluded that the fins began jutting up
on the drawing boards as the stylists sought to push the midsection
lower and lower. He asserted: "The analogy between this squashing
effect and tight lacing at the waist and expansion of the skirt in the
crinoline era is almost irresistible." He went on to say, "The tail fin—
supposedly derived from the airplane tail—may be interpreted as the
last resort of over-extension, an outcropping that quite seriously serves
much the same purpose as the bustle or the train."
By the time the 1961 models were appearing, the retreat from the
long, low look had begun. Tail fins on almost every make of car—
evidently by common consent of the stylists—became visibly smaller.
Flared blades gave way to rolled edges.
The groping by automobile stylists for cheap ways to make their
new-model cars look different also resulted in a fascination with adding
lights during the late fifties. General Motors cars, which once had
managed to get about at night with only three lights (two in front and
one in the back), began carrying up to fourteen outside lights fore and
aft. Apparently the automobile stylists couldn't agree whether all these
banks of lights were most needed on the front of the car or on the rear.
Some stylists placed them mostly on the front (Cadillacs, Chevrolet
Impalas had eight there), whereas others loaded the lights mostly on the
rear. On some cars some of the tail lights were dummies, or nonfunctioning.
By 1960, however, anyone who owned a two-year-old car with a
dozen or more outside lights could reasonably be expected to feel his
car had been dated in an uncomfortable way. Now the designers were
achieving a new look by subtracting lights! Likewise, the millions of
two-toned and three-toned cars stamped out by the Detroit automobile
makers in the mid- and late fifties had become sirens old before their
prime. Detroit began promoting monotones. Only on the rooftop was a
second color now occasionally permitted. Even the swing of a portion
of the market to compacts was not an unrelieved disaster from the
styling standpoint. The compacts made the long, fat, gaudy makes of the
late fifties—especially those in the lower-prestige lines—seem terribly
gauche. Every swing, whether seemingly sensible or seemingly
insensible, helps create obsolescence. It is the swing that counts.
It should be noted that Europeans had less and less basis for feeling
smug about the way Americans were being enticed by "dynamic
obsolescence" in the automotive field. Until 1960, most European
makers took pride in their refusal to make changes just for the sake of
change. But as the Europeans built up their auto-making capacity at a
furious rate to cash in on the opening in the United States and around
the world created by Detroit's commitment to gargantuan vehicles, these
Europeans found themselves—with the introduction of American
compacts—hustling to build markets. This led them to begin making
more frequent visible changes in style, in the Detroit manner. Their
problem in thus creating obsolescence of desirability in their home
markets was, however, complicated. Most European car buyers still had
the idea that a motorcar should last a good long time. A sales official of
the British Motor Corporation, Ltd., was heard to complain3 : "All
you've got to do is drive out on a Sunday and have a look. You'll find
people out washing and polishing cars that are twenty years old. Why,
the blighters think more of their old cars than they do of their wives!"
American automakers, when they would talk about their strategy of
planned obsolescence of desirability at all, insisted that the annual
model switch was essential to the American way of life. A Ford
executive argued: "We are confident that the annual change cycle has
advantages for the national economy in terms of employment, and it is
essential for competitive reasons. The change in the appearance of
models each year in creases car sales."
The Big Three of Detroit were spending more than a billion dollars
a year to put a new dress on their cars each year. To put it another way,
since the consumer of course pays in the end, the average new-car buyer
was paying more than two hundred dollars extra to cover the annual
cost of restyling the cars. And this did not include the actual cost of the
non-functional "bright-work" or "goop" placed on the cars. That added
at least another hundred dollars.
A further cost of the annual styling was the loss in quality. Laurence
Crooks of Consumers Union put it this way: "The annual model change
has a great deal to do with lack of quality in cars, and any speeding up
of this changing . . . always redounds to the discredit of the cars. It takes
a long time to perfect a car and get the bugs out of it."
Because of all these factors related to style change, American cars
were declining in value at a precipitous rate. The Federal Reserve Bank
of Philadelphia made a study of this aging problem of "second-hand
sirens" and concluded that motorcars were depreciating twice as fast as
they reasonably should. It explained: 4 "Because yearly model changes
make a car look older than it actually is, mechanically speaking, the
price drops faster than the remaining mileage potential. . . . A car four
years old with roughly two-thirds of its active life left usually sells for
about one-third of its original price. Variety and change accelerate
obsolescence." (This calculation assumed a potentially "active" life of
twelve years. Actually, that figure appears to be out of date. By 1960,
the tendency to junk cars before they were ten years old had become the
prevailing pattern. Runzheimer & Company, the expert on fleetoperation costs, found that Detroit-made cars were depreciating almost
twice as fast as the little snub-nosed Volkswagen, whose manufacturers
consistently scorned the annual model change. While keeping the same
profile over the years, however, it quietly introduced hundreds of small
changes.)
American motorists by 1960 were trading in their "old" car by the
time it reached an average age of two and a quarter years. The Ford
Motor Company in one of its advertisements said this showed how
smart and shrewd the average motorcar owner was becoming. At that
age, it pointed out, the car starts showing minor ailments and dents.
Further, it stated, "The car is two years old in style. Its fine edge is
gone."
For many of the cast-off beauties produced in the late fifties the
"fine edge" certainly was gone. Used-car dealers were calling them
"Jonahs." Their heels now seemed run over, their mascara was running,
and their chrome jewelry tarnished; their bulk was excessive and their
power windows, brakes, and steering wheels frequently malfunctioning.
The styling trend in American automobile design as 1961
approached was away from pink dinosaurism, and toward a more
formal design. A design consultant for one of the Big Three automobile
producers confided to me what the "main styling stream" was likely to
be in the early sixties. He said that a more upright, classical, and austere
look was in the works.
Professor Robinson gained much the same impression in his chats
with Detroit designers. The trend, he gathered, would be away from the
squashed-down, streamlined look to a more "squared-off, boxy look."
(There was also at least a promise of more "functional innovation.") He
found designers showing fascination with models of early American
cars, with their boxy, squared-off looks. Professor Robinson
commented: "None of them expressed any astonishment when I raised
the question of the likelihood of a revival movement."
The motorcar profile was not only destined to become more upright,
but it evidently was essential that any change in profile should be quite
drastic. Professor Robinson explained why the change would have to be
made abruptly rather than gradually: "Having utilized gradual
compression and lengthwise expansion of the body as a means of
differentiating new models from old for so many years, it would be
entirely self-defeating for the industry to start building them [just] a few
inches shorter or higher. . . . The reason? It would be tantamount to
repeating the dimensional style characteristics of 1957-58. The cars
would then be duplicates of silhouettes already cluttering up the usedcar lot. . . . A fashion can never retreat gradually and in good order.
Like a dictator it must always expand its aggressiveness—or collapse."
Eric Larrabee found in the late fifties that harassed motorcar
designers were wondering how much longer their magic would continue
to work. However, they were alone in their uneasiness. He related:
"Everyone else in Detroit seems to believe that the designers will be
able to go on pulling new models out of the hat indefinitely." In mid1960, a spokesman for one of the Big Three was hinting that
"specialized vehicles" were being carefully considered—presumably to
promote the more-cars-per-family trend. And he suggested that because
of the staggering costs and diminishing effectiveness of resculpturing
cars each year, the annual model changes would start involving less
"massive and exotic changes." It turned out, however, that even the
compacts that appeared in 1960 were being drastically restyled for
1961.
Earlier, as the sixties loomed, U.S. News & World Report carried a
report for its business readers on "The Big Changes Coming in Autos."
A subhead read: "Ahead: Much Restyling."
Let us look next at evidences of obsolescence in quality in the
motorcar field. Some of the evidence of quality loss can be attributed, as
indicated, to the frequent shifts in design produced by the straining to
create obsolescence of desirability. But there is also some evidence of
quality loss that cannot be explained by frequent styling changes.
CHAPTER 9
America's Toughest Car—
and Thirty Models Later
"Letting his fins down, Clare Briggs, Chrysler vice president, last
week . . . said, auto service is bad, and the quality of cars is 'not as
good as 10 years ago.' The auto industry, admitted Briggs, 'has treated
the public badly, to say it mildly.' "—TIME, June 2, 1958.
A FRIEND OF MINE WAS INTERESTED IN MR. BRIGGS'S CANDID
observation that he wrote asking Mr. Briggs to amplify why he felt this
drop in quality had occurred. Second thoughts or more cautious counsel
had apparently persuaded Mr. Briggs to put his fins back up. He replied
by sending a clipping in which an automotive driver praised the
Chrysler Corporation's then-current Imperial. In the article, the Imperial
was hailed, but for reasons that had little bearing on durability.
Examples: the car's pick-up, looks, deep door pockets, deep carpeting,
big trunk, maneuverability, quiet motor, brakes, turn indicator switch,
side mirror.
In fairness to Mr. Briggs it should be stated that his own company
has had a reputation for being more engineering-minded than some of
its major competitors. But still his observation about the general decline
in the quality of cars was a squalid commentary on an industry that
boasts of spending hundreds of millions of dollars each year on
"research and development." Little of the money appears to have gone
to improve the longevity of motorcars. In 1956, the motorcars being led
to the scrap-yard chopping blocks were three years younger than the
motorcars being scrapped in the late forties. The Automobile
Manufacturers Association chose to explain away this awkward fact by
asserting that motorists in the fifties coddled their cars less than those in
the forties, when motorcars were in short supply, and when Americans
found how surprisingly long a car could be kept running. The
association preferred to compare the 1956 longevity with the prewar
1941 longevity. Even here, however, it had little to shout about. In the
fifteen-year span, the automakers had managed to add only a fraction of
one year to the life expectancy of automobiles. During the same fifteen
years, medical science had added many years to the longevity of the
nation's human beings. It should also be added that in those fifteen years
there had been a great increase in smooth, paved roads. Meanwhile, the
major motorcar makers had almost entirely stopped stressing durability
in their sales appeals.
In late 1958, Printers' Ink conceded that "there is a widespread
feeling that 'they don't make cars the way they used to'—either
mechanically or from the point of view of interior decor." And an
official of the Automotive Finance Association in testifying at a Senate
subcommittee hearing told of a survey he had conducted with
association members on the state of the automobile industry. He quoted
one member as responding: "The quality of today's automobile does not
compare favorably with past years. . . . The price of the product
continues to go up and the quality continues to go down. Improvement
in automobiles in the past few years has strictly been tinsmith work."
Meanwhile, Automotive News reported charges that new cars were
missing bolts, that they suffered from malfunctioning parts, squeaks,
rattles, and other maladjustments that had become "the rule and not the
exception in present American cars." The charge was made that
motorcar manufacturers had been resorting to "slipshod assembly
method" and that the "poor quality of mass production cars" was
becoming evident.
The American Automobile Association released some figures on
automobile breakdowns which indicated that the mounting garage bills
of individual motorists were not isolated cases. It disclosed that
although motorcar registrations rose by less than one million from 1957
to 1958, the number of motorcar breakdowns leaped upward by five and
one half million!
Sale of automobile parts soared year after year. Partly, of course,
this was caused by the increase in the number of cars on the road. But
partly, the executive vice-president of a Long Island ignition parts
manufacturing firm told The Wall Street Journal in 1960, it was because
"manufacturers are building them so they'll get to the junk pile faster. . .
. But they're compensating," he added, "by making them give better
performance." As an example, he said, the shock absorber was currently
being designed to give more cushioning but not to last as long as older
types. Also, he observed, "today almost as soon as new cars hit the
street they need replacement parts for all the gadgets they are loaded
with."
How much of this evident obsolescence of quality was planned?
Certainly, as indicated, some of it was due to the industry's haste in
rushing out its annual models each fall with rejiggered trimmings and
added accessories. But some of it also undoubtedly was due to the
reluctance of many of the manufacturers to make a car that would hold
the affection of its owner for more than a very few years. In all of the
arguing about motorcar design, the makers kept their eye on the ball.
And that ball was their total annual dollar volume in sales.
If maximum dollar volume was their goal, then the temptation was
great to do three things: upgrade the price of the car; sell the car to as
many people as possible; and make sure the buyers would be on the
market again before too long to buy another car. The inevitable result of
such thinking was best summed up in a letter to The Wall Street Journal
in the late fifties by Mr. Glenn Ashworth of Morgantown, West
Virginia. Mr. Ashworth was critical of current automobile design. It
was apparent from his technical discussion that he was knowledgeable
on the subject. He attributed the current state of motorcar design to this
factor:
"Maximum sales volume demands the cheapest construction for the
briefest interval the buying public will tolerate."
In one succinct sentence Mr. Ashworth enunciated what appears to
be an Iron Law of Marketing in mid-century America. Willingness to
follow the dictates of the Iron Law seems to vary by divisions within an
automobile-making company. Engineers tend to resist the law more
than stylists, who are much more sales-oriented. This difference in
willingness to bow to the law has produced significant differences in the
rate at which quality deterioration appears in different sectors of the
motorcar.
The parts of the motorcar still clearly controlled by the engineers—
those out of sight under the hood—have tended to maintain their quality
longer than the visible parts more fully controlled by the stylists. The
chief of Runzheimer & Company, which specializes in estimating costs
of automobile fleet operations, takes a dim view of some aspects of
recent automobile design, but he has found that the innards of motorcars
have shown consistent improvement. "Mechanical dependability,
reflecting design of the vital motive and transmissions parts and quality
of metals used, has greatly increased during the past twenty years." And
he offered the interesting incidental information that "noticeable
deterioration in over-all car performance, and the consequent increase in
over-all operating costs, usually begins somewhere between 45,000 and
60,000 total miles." It is during this mileage span, he indicated, that it
makes sense to think about turning in your car on a new one.
One engineering journal carried the charge in 1959 that engineers
were falling down on the job because little was being achieved in
prolonging the life of engines and improving their thermal efficiency.
At least, however, the engineers were not charged with building engines
for shorter life spans than formerly.
Laurence Crooks, the chief automotive expert at Consumers Union,
has concluded that today's engines are "very good." However, his
comments became scathing when he talked about the trend of
automobile design as a whole. His auto-testing experience has
convinced him that "the quality on the whole has been going downhill.
. . . Stuff keeps falling off."
Mr. Crooks spoke nostalgically of the 1941 Chevrolet as a motorcar
that really had built-in quality and sensible proportions. To cite another
example, he said that few cars today were as solidly and sensibly built
as the postwar Hudsons. And the 1952 Chevrolet is a car he
remembered with fondness. He felt that the 1959 Chevrolet was no
match for the 1956 model. Speaking of the quality of cars in general, he
told me in 1959: "Cars were better built five years ago for the state of
the technology existing at the time than they are today. The cars then
were more honestly built."
The bodywork of motorcars and their structural rigidity were not as
good as they had been a decade ago, he felt. And this widespread lack
of structural rigidity had played a major role in promoting "creative
obsolescence." Nothing makes a car seem old faster than rattles. And
motorcars produced in recent years have tended to develop rattles faster
than they did a decade earlier. Further, he said, "the rattling gets worse
as the car grows older. With the vogue for hardtops—into which less
structural stiffness can be built—this characteristic is getting worse." In
1959, The Wall Street Journal took note of all the complaints about
late-model cars by conducting a survey. It quoted the owner of an
automobile repair shop in Detroit as saying that engine quality was
commendable but that "the bodies today are cheesy. They're full of
rattles."
Another thing that makes a fairly new car seem cheesy and old—
regardless of its dependability in transporting its owner—is exterior rust
and corrosion. In the late fifties, many models developed mottled looks
with a rapidity that appalled their owners. Some motorcar makers such
as Oldsmobile installed corrosion-resistant aluminum grilles as a sales
feature because of all the unhappiness, but others evidently were
content to let the discolored splotches appear. Frequent resculpturing of
the exterior was said to be one cause of the difficulties. The widespread
use of salt on roads might also be a factor. But some of the corrosion, it
was charged, was being deliberately encouraged. Financial writer Sylvia
Porter quoted officials of an industrial-design firm as asserting that
"alloys are designed to rust instead of last."
Consumer Bulletin, published by Consumers' Research, Inc., took
note of all the complaints about quick-rusting bodywork by reporting:
"There seems to be no doubt that bodies of present-day cars could be
made to last much longer than they now do, but manufacturers are fully
aware that if they make their cars too durable, future sales will suffer;
consumers will naturally tend to keep their cars longer before turning
them in if bodies have well resisted corrosion and other types of damage
that mar appearance."
These "other types" of damage that mar appearance with distressing
frequency often appeared inside the car: tattered floor mats, sagging
springs, grimy or worn upholstery. A new-car dealer told Automotive
News in 1957 that he was "ashamed'' of most of the recent models he
had sold which then had up to 20,000 miles on them. He said, "The
interior trim looks as if it may have been dragged behind for at least half
of the miles. . . . The upholstery in the cars today may be fancier and
have the 'metallic buildup story' but brother, watch out! If the
manufacturers cannot sell with the new cars a good, durable, longwearing upholstery, why not send the new cars out without the seats
upholstered and let us install good seat covers?"
In considering the shrinking durability of modern cars, we should
also take note of the shortened life span of a number of individual parts.
Take tires. A leading chemical scientist working for a tire company
told me in the early fifties that he had high hopes a tire would be
developed that would last 100,000 miles. Perhaps he was just being
woolly-headed, but at any rate in the following years when
technological miracles were said to be happening on all fronts, the life
expectancy of tires kept going down and down. The Wall Street Journal
reported in 1959 that "tire company engineers privately concede tires
are wearing out faster these days." The manager of the American Chicle
Company's fleet of 430 cars told Journal investigators, "We've not only
noticed that we get less mileage, we've computed it to be 25% less." He
added that his tires were now averaging about 15,000 miles. A few
months earlier, the Journal of the Society of Automotive Engineers
carried a report by an official of the Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company
stating that in three recent years treadwear life on American tires had
dropped 18 per cent. A comparative analysis of tread-mileage on firstline 6.70-15 tires of various makes tested by Consumers Union in two
different years showed these spreads from best to poorest:
1954—The range was from 22,000 to 31,000 miles.
1958—The range was from 18,000 to 27,500 miles.
Conditions for the tests can never be precisely duplicated, but still
these figures would suggest a sharp downward trend was occurring in
tire tread-mileage.
One explanation offered by tire-company officials for the decline in
the life expectancy of tires has been the trend to smaller fourteen-inch
wheels as a styling feature. But note that the above comparisons were
all made on the basis of a fifteen-inch wheel! Undoubtedly, the trend
during most of the fifties to higher-powered, bulkier cars and power
brakes helped the decline along. The Wall Street Journal's report on the
tire situation included two observations of particular interest. It said that
"auto companies generally maintain a stony silence when questioned
about complaints of declining tire mileage." And what about the tire
companies? The Journal reported:
"Of course there's no reason to believe that the tire companies
themselves are particularly upset about faster-wearing tires, although it's
a blow to their engineers' professional pride. Tires which wear out
rapidly mean more sales."
Or take the mufflers. We noted in Chapter 4 that they have been
burning out faster than they did a decade ago. This shortened life span,
in fact, could be stated quite precisely. Automobile mufflers in 1958
had only one half the life expectancy of mufflers bought a decade
earlier. Design Sense, published by Lippincott & Margulies, the
industrial-design firm, took note of the shortened life span of mufflers
in calling on industry to take advantage of new technologies to give
longer life to products. "To take just one example," it said, "a major
steel company has had available for some time—with no takers—a
lead-coated steel which, for just 8¢ more per auto muffler, would give a
product that would last the life of the car. Instead, automakers are still
installing mufflers that must be replaced on an average of once every
two years at a cost to the consumer of $18 to $27 per muffler."
But perhaps a change was coming. At least American Motors—
which was leading the fight against obsolescence planning in both the
automotive and appliance fields—announced a ceramic-coated exhaust
system for both muffler and tail pipe of its 1961 Ramblers. The process
was first developed by the military for jet planes and was said to make
exhausts virtually impervious to corrosion. The company said in making
the announcement that, while the process is more expensive, it is in line
with the company's policy of seeking greater product durability.
Motorcar makers interested in building a more durable vehicle
might well examine for inspiration Citroën's "Deux Chevaux," which
reportedly often runs 100,000 miles over all sorts of roads with
practically no maintenance. It has an eighteen-month waiting list of
eager Frenchmen.
Or better still, the motorcar makers might try copying some of the
features of the Model A Ford, perhaps the most rugged motorcar ever
built. Many hundreds of these four-bangers are still getting daily use in
North America three decades after they were built. They have been used
to tow cars two decades younger to the scrap-yard crushing machines;
and are eagerly sought by collectors and hot rodders alike. The Model
A's straightforward frame (a simple set of rails with three connecting
members), its rear end, its differential gears, and its engine have proved
in thousands of hot-rod races to be very rugged indeed.
One of the happiest motorcar owners I know is a sales
representative who must often travel fifty thousand miles a year and has
long felt bedeviled by the high maintenance cost of his cars. He heard
that the Checker company—maker of taxicabs—was starting to make a
few thousand extra cars each year for sale to the general public. Every
time he went to New York, he made a point of riding in Checker cabs
and pumped the drivers on performance. He relates, "They always gave
it high praise for durability, and seemed unanimous that it goes one
hundred thousand miles without a valve or ring job." He encountered
several drivers whose cars had passed the two-hundred-and-fiftythousand mark in mileage. The simplicity of maintenance also appealed
to this man. Quickness of repair is vital for cab operation. He points out,
"The four fenders are bolted on, and when they are damaged the
replacement cost is only about twenty-five dollars."
Several months ago this man bought a Checker Superba and has
become very fond of it. He explains, "We all love the level floor in the
passenger compartment—no hump—and the wonderful visibility, the
headroom, the wide doors, and the short turning radius." (It can turn
around in a thirty-seven-foot circle.)
Now let us turn from the American motorcar to the American home
and explore the extent to which obsolescence through deterioration of
quality is promoting sales of the products that go into the home. Here,
the evidence of deterioration is substantial indeed.
CHAPTER 10
The Short, Sweet Life of
Home Products
"My mother had the same washing machine for twenty years. She
has the same refrigerator now she had when I went to high school thirty
years ago. . . . We [my own family] built a 'leisure house' five years ago.
. . . We're on our second washing machine and our second drier. . . .
We threw out the disposal. . . . We're on our third vacuum cleaner."—
Industrial designer J. GORDON LIPPINCOTT.
PROBABLY WE ALL TEND TO LET NOSTALGIA COLOR OUR
recolections as to the durability of our family possessions in earlier
decades. Still, the trade press in the home-furnishing field is not given
to nostalgia, and all during the past decade it reported evidence of a
lowering of quality of such goods as rugs, furniture, upholstery,
television sets, refrigerators, stoves, and lamps. One retailer was
reported observing: "There's no such thing any more as a consumer
durable. They are all semi-durables, with the accent on the semi." He
found the serviceable life expectancy of a range then to be about seven
years, and some of these new automatic washers not even three years.1
(Other sources gave longer life expectancies.)
One of the trade journals that carried discussions of quality
deterioration in some lines was Home Furnishings Daily. In 1957, it
carried two articles on lower quality found in house-wares (such as
toasters). Its investigator reported: "Many housewares manufacturers
are cheapening the quality of their products, and are likely to step up
this process even more in the months to come." Later that year, the
journal made a survey of 127 appliance dealers and reported finding
increasing difficulties caused by faulty appliances and television sets
being sent back by customers, often a few weeks or months after
purchase. According to the dealers, their worst problems came in these
fields, listed in descending order of aggravation:
1. Washing machines
2. Refrigerators
3. Driers
4. Television sets
5. Washer-dry combos
6. Ranges
7. Air conditioners
8. Freezers.
The particular parts that were reported causing the most trouble
were, first of all, timers. Others cited were controls, motors, cabinets,
finishes, components and soldering, tubes, thermostats, pumps and
switches, wiring and defrosters, transmissions and valves. Behind the
difficulties, the dealers felt, were such causes as lack of quality control,
poor inspection, poor craftsmanship, poor engineering, and "workers
who don't care."
Other complaints focused on the word obsolescence. A financial
columnist for The New York Herald Tribune grumbled about the
fascination with "dynamic obsolescence" being shown by appliance
makers and said, "The only dynamism we've spotted in the appliances
around our house is the way they deteriorate after not too much use."
And the chief of the product-testing department of a business firm
complained to an appliance technical conference of the American
Institute of Electrical Engineers in 1958: "The poor consumer is really
the fall guy! Year after year this consumer copes with appliances that
cost more and more and, in many cases, give less and less satisfactory
service. . . . The rumor that appliances are being built for only a limited
life—to serve the great god, obsolescence—does the industry harm."
A part of the breakdown pattern apparently was the loading of the
appliances with gadgets that often immobilized the whole machine
when they failed. Another aspect of the high breakdown rates was the
growing use of plastic parts that snapped or warped. Often the plastics
were not intended for the usage to which they were put. And then there
were charges that appliance makers were cutting down on the gauge of
steel, the size and number of bolts, and the quality of interior finishes
where corrosion protection is important.
In addition, there was specific indication that evidence of quality
obsolescence was not unconnected with the drive to increase
replacement sales as the industry fought off glut. An appliance buyer
commented on the glutting of the market for appliances in 1956 and
wondered if the makers would try to get out of this mess by deliberately
producing for "a short life in order to keep it turning over." An electrical
manufacturing company official, obviously aware of the same
temptation, warned the following month in the same journal (Retailing
Daily), "If we are to create obsolescence . . . and find ourselves making
products that last too long, we must rely on something besides
mechanical deficiencies to create a replacement market."
Possibly some manufacturers were not too careful about finding
"something besides mechanical deficiencies" to move goods. As the
appliance industry began pulling out of its severe recession in 1958, a
business writer for The New York Times reported: 2 "Spokesmen for
stores say the recovery may be due to obsolescence or breakdown of
appliances, combined with a spurt of confidence in the general
economy. Manufacturers add that an increase in residential building
recently also is a factor."
Was something more than reasonable wear and tear involved in
creating this "obsolescence or breakdown"? Perhaps not, at least in
many cases. But let us look at reports on the trends in quality for some
specific products that are supposed to help make a house a home.
THE FAMILY WASHER. This, as we have indicated, leads the list of
the home appliances most likely to cause trouble soon after purchase.
Monte Florman, chief of the appliance-testing division at Consumers
Union, said: "These are the biggest offenders in my experience and also
on the basis of the relatively larger volume of mail that Consumers
Union receives from dissatisfied users." He said they should be planned
for heavy use, but often are not. A substantial percentage of the new
machines fail in some way during the months the Consumers Union test
them. He feels there is no question that home washers could be made
more durable, but that it might involve leaving off some of the gloss and
gadgetry to maintain the present price level.
Many complaints by consumers seem to center on the
malfunctioning of plastic parts of the washers. A Wall Street Journal
report on consumer dissatisfaction with modern home products reported
a number of complaints about grief caused by plastic parts.
The chief of a market-research firm told me that some of the
embarrassingly early and conspicuous breakdowns of appliances were
due to errors in estimating the product's death date; they broke down
before the warranty period was up. On the other hand, some of the
breaking down undoubtedly resulted from simple corner-cutting or
haste to get out a new model, with the companies that were driving for
increased sales showing less concern about durability of their product
than the public might assume it deserved. When the Philco Corporation
bought a washer-producing company, it inherited a tub full of trouble in
the form of rusted bearings in the inherited company's washing machine
(Power-Surge). It seems that a plastic device in the base of the tub of
many of these washers would not withstand the heat of wash water. The
device cracked and let water seep down into the bearings. Philco finally
felt obliged to offer to pay owners their full purchase price if the owners
would turn in their Power-Surge on a current model.
Some Hotpoint models made in 1955, 1956, and 1957 proved so
troublesome that sales for its home-laundry appliances slipped for a
while. Citing Hotpoint's tribulations, a business writer for The New York
Herald Tribune made this interesting comment:3 "Distributors were
getting six or seven repair calls a year on these Hotpoints, compared
with a national average of two or three repair calls." Note that national
average!
In order to get back in the good graces of its buying public Hotpoint
announced a $10,000,000 repair and replacement program. Soon,
however, Sales Management was reporting that Hotpoint had stopped
publicizing the program. It surmised that too many people were
applying for replacement and sending costs "right through the roof.
Hotpoint service departments tell us they are flooded with demands for
new machines." The moral of all this, the journal admonished its
marketing readers, is "Don't jump into a replacement or repair program.
Carefully evaluate the cost, the customer response. One-tenth of your
products may be defective, but nine-tenths of your customers might like
new models at your expense."
One company that had been very slow to change its models was
Maytag. Consumers Union reported a few months ago that the basic
form of the Maytag washer had not changed in many years. Perhaps it
was no coincidence that Consumers Union tests regularly showed the
Maytag washer as being of consistently high over-all quality. And when
I asked my local repairman—who has been at the bedside of our fouryear-old washer three times this year—to name a really well-built
washer, Maytag was the one that occurred most emphatically to him.
THE FAMILY REFRIGERATOR. Here, too, gimmickery has seemed to
fascinate many producers more than durability. The 1958 appliance
technical conference of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers
was scolded about the "flood of flimsy gadgets and accessories [mostly
plastic] that plague the user." An example cited was the snapping of the
plastic handles of crisper drawers. Plastics have appealed to producers
not only because they are usually cheaper than metal but also because
their built-in colors help promote selling on the basis of style and
impulse.
It should be noted, of course, that plastics can vary considerably in
ruggedness. They can be heavy or thin. Plastic dials and knobs can have
a metal sleeve to take the screw, or they can be just plastic. The latter
are the more likely to pull off in your hand. Also plastics can be tough
or fragile. Appliance Manufacturer 4 pondered the "oddity" that the
manufacturers were frequently not using the most durable plastics
available. It talked about "parts and accessories in refrigerators that
looked fine in the showroom, but discolored or cracked under normal
home use . . . [yet] there were plastics available which would have cut
costs—maybe not quite as dramatically—and performed adequately in
the application." It chose to blame this "oddity" on the industry's
headlong, single-minded rush to cut cost.
THE TELEVISION SET. A few years ago a guided-missile expert
named Fred Stevens working for Northrup Aircraft, Inc., said there was
no technological reason now why television sets could not be built that
would run for eight years without a single repair call. This could be
done, he said, if television makers used techniques employed in
building missiles.
Such a statement simply revealed that Mr. Stevens, with his head
buried in defense work, was badly behind the times. As Consumer
Reports pointed out, he "hasn't heard of the emphasis among
manufacturers of consumer goods on built-in obsolescence."
At Consumers Union a majority of the 1958 test samples of portable
television sets bought developed failures within a few weeks of being
purchased, while being tested, and had to be repaired. Consumers Union
reported it had also been encountering an increasing number of set
failures in twenty-one-inch table models.
Karl H. Nagel, head of Consumers Union television testing division,
told me that despite all the miraculous claims made in television
advertising, a television set made in 1952 offered a "nicer picture" than
sets made in 1959. He said: "There has been no major advance in terms
of the quality of the received picture since the early 1950's." And he felt
that sets made in 1947 were better constructed than those being offered
for sale a decade later. In 1947, television sets were able to reproduce
all the picture components contained in the "signal" sent out by a
broadcasting station. In 1956, not a single one of the sets tested could
reproduce the transmitted picture!
Mr. Nagel pointed out that skimping had been taking place
particularly in tubes, both in number and quality. A television set made
in 1947 had more than thirty tubes. By the late fifties, some sets had
only half as many because the makers had been designing multiplefunction tubes. When such a multiple-function tube goes bad in one
part, you must throw the whole thing out. Furthermore, he said, "Tubes
just don't last as long." Most of them today don't have the life that
earlier tubes had, so that they can't take the continuous use the earlier
tubes could take. They are built "too close to operative limits."
A number of other competent witnesses have also remarked on the
declining quality of modern television sets. Testers at Consumers'
Research, for example, found that the 1957 television receivers were in
general not as good as the 1956 models in quality and performance.
And, in 1957, a spokesman for the National Appliance and Radio-TV
Dealers Association lamented that the quality in television sets had
become so poor that dealers couldn't make a "decent profit" if they tried
to make good on all complaints. He said: "It is not enough that 80 per
cent of the TV sets sold function normally. We all know that one rotten
apple can spoil the whole barrel."
Don Baines, a columnist for Home Furnishings Daily, noted
uneasily in the late fifties that many appliance manufacturers were
rushing to get into the field of servicing their equipment. He asked:
"Why all the rush to get into the servicing angle? Is it because the
appliance won't stay in A-l working order too many days after it is
installed in the home?" He added that a suspicious person might begin
to wonder "just how good the appliances are." And he concluded: "I'm
beginning to suspect that the manufacturers know something consumers
don't know and frankly I'm worried. Is that blasted little TV set of mine
due to conk out again?"
Some companies, it should be noted, show a greater dedication to
the ideal of quality than others. Zenith is one company that has gone
slowly in embracing innovations and cost-cutting short cuts. And it has
fought to build and maintain a "quality" image. In 1959, Consumers
Union listed seventeen television sets in the twenty-one-inch category
and found only one that deserved to be check-rated. It was a Zenith.
SMALL APPLIANCES AND OTHER HOUSEWARES. Trade reports
commented throughout the late fifties on an upsurge of early
breakdowns of some types of household electric wares. In many brands
returns were running up to half of all items sold. And, of course, many
people who had bought "lemons" or won them as trading-stamp
premiums didn't bother or weren't able to return them. Retailing Daily
reported that those returned by indignant customers demanding
replacement were usually replaced. The defective ones were repaired
and then "resold during storewide clearances or at special sales for
'demonstration and floor models.' " The most troublesome electric
housewares, it said, were toasters, irons, and percolators. All three use
thermostats, which often failed.
In 1957, the same journal (which had changed its name to Home
Furnishings Daily) reported that manufacturers were "watering" their
products in dozens of different ways to cheapen them. It mentioned
reduction of the thickness of plating, substitution of cheaper materials,
and reduction in the size of products. It concluded that in some cases the
"high end of the line"—or the highest-priced models offered by a
manufacturer—were "no better quality-wise than the low end was a few
years ago." Consumers Union expressed its disgust with the quality of
toasters being offered the public. It pointed out in 1956 that although
pop-up, self-timing toasters had been on the market for several decades,
only three out of a sample of twenty-two tested were high in quality.
Many of the test samples were defective, and some were downright
hazardous. At about the same time, Retailing Daily noted that "switches
on rotisseries have been turning bad lately."
In 1960, Home Furnishings Daily reported that breakdowns on
electric housewares were setting an all-time record. Significantly,
however, there was now a reduction in the breakdowns that came under
the warranty guarantees. Manufacturers had been straining mightily to
relieve themselves of responsibility for breakdowns, which they found
"very expensive." They evidently did this by (1) making sure the
products would outlast the warranties and (2) cutting back the
warranties. Many dealers in the San Francisco area lamented that they
often could not return merchandise to manufacturers when the item
proved defective after a few weeks' use.
If cost cutting was behind much of the deterioration in the quality of
appliances, how much more would it cost to make more rugged
appliances? There was testimony that it would not cost much. In 1958,
the director of product engineering at Whirlpool Corporation told
appliance engineers meeting in Chicago, "If we would look closely at
our products, it would be apparent that improvements can be made at
little or no expense." An official of the Electrical Testing Laboratories
in New York offered the opinion that many improvements could be
made in electrical appliances without undue cost which aren't made. He
expressed belief that the industry feels products should be made with
only the "required utility" to keep pace with competitors.
Laundromat washing machines usually are more rugged than
machines sold to the home user, and last many hours longer without
breaking down. Their cost of manufacture is comparable to that of the
home machines because they come without the jukebox effects and
gimmicks felt to be desirable for the home market.
So much for the quality of appliances. Let us now examine the
obsolescence in quality observable in several categories of home
furnishings. The philosophy guiding many manufacturers was described
to me by Louis Cheskin of the Color Research Institute. It was his
conviction that the public was largely responsible for encouraging the
philosophy. He put it this way:
"Why make the handles on cups so that they won't break off? Who
wants to pay 10 per cent more for dishes so that the dishes will last a
lifetime? Most housewives want or welcome an excuse to buy a new set
of dishes every year or so. Who wants furniture to last forever? The
large American middle classes do not. They want furniture to be in
style, not outdated. . . . Furniture, clothes, dishes can all be made to last
longer at very little additional cost. But neither the maker nor the
consumer is interested in this."
The makers of home furnishings might be cheered by such a
rationale as Mr. Cheskin offered, but they felt that American consumers
still had a long way to go in shedding old-fashioned ideas about
durability. Many felt that—unfortunately for them—most North
Americans still tended to think of homes as symbols of permanence.
Thus prospective customers seemed to feel vaguely guilty if they
weren't assured that the carpet or chair they were buying would last a
lifetime. A trade journal noted this lack of reasonableness when it
contrasted the attitude of the typical mattress buyer with that of the
typical automobile buyer. The motorcar buyer, it said, cheerfully pays
$4,500 for a motorcar that he expects to get only two or three years' use
out of, and yet the same man "practically demands a gold-plated
guarantee that the new luxury mattress [costing only two hundred
dollars] will be good to his dying day."
Such consumer attitudes as these, it said, "have been bedeviling the
entire home furnishings industry."
Here, then, are some comments and facts concerning the levels of
quality that have become widespread in the past few years for specific
home furnishings.
FLOOR COVERINGS. During a panel discussion in Atlanta between
housewives and rug merchants, one housewife asked a question which
trade-press reports called "the bombshell question." She began by
pointing out that sixteen years before she had bought a rug for eightyfive dollars, had given it hard use every day, and it "has not lost any of
its color." Further, it showed no worn spots and no worn nap. Her
"bombshell" question was this: "Do any of the carpet companies make
any such quality as that now?" It was unanswered.
The trend in rug quality was summed up by Mildred E. Brady,
editorial director of Consumers Union, in these words: "There is no
doubt whatever that until recently very good rugs have lasted from
generation to generation. Today, ten years is the commercially promised
life for a good wool rug."
A multitude of the rugs being sold were far from being "good" by
even the lowered standards prevailing. Carpet mills received so many
complaints from customers about poor-wearing carpeting in the late
fifties that they tightened up their complaint procedures to protect
themselves. Very quietly the rugmakers began putting a two-year
ceiling on the period that they would listen to grievances. Retailing
Daily reported that the retail rug dealers were uneasy about this twoyear ceiling the manufacturers had imposed even though it was
generous by appliance or automotive standards. They felt that the
manufacturers "would have to begin to educate consumers to the idea
that carpeting of today will not wear as long as the floor coverings that
their parents had." The journal continued:
"As one furniture dealer states it: Today's consumer expects carpet
to last as long or longer than her mother's because she is paying three
times as much for it. She knows her mother's carpeting lasted between
ten and fifteen years. This was said to be not an unreasonable
expectation but also one which the consumer had to be educated away
from. The buying public does not accept readily the idea of
obsolescence in carpets and rugs."
The same journal quoted the owner of an interior-decorating shop in
Birmingham, Alabama, who voiced considerable distaste for products
that would last twenty years in view of all the easy credit available.
Speaking of floor coverings, he asked: "Why should it last forever, or
even ten years for that matter?" He urged manufacturers to forget about
how long a product would last and to concentrate on getting out goodquality fashion merchandise. His main interest, presumably, was on the
word "fashion."
A part of the trouble with modern carpeting was that the
manufacturers had downgraded quality and fought off quality standards.
Another problem was the introduction of tufted carpets, which could be
made much faster and cheaper than woven carpets. The makers of
woven rugs reduced the quality of their rugs in order to compete more
effectively with the tufted rugs. Another reason for the deterioration
was that much of the carpeting was being bought by big housing
developers who tended to install the cheapest floor covering they could
in order to increase their profit margins. Still another problem was that
the long-wearing wool from wild sheep—which helped make grandma's
rugs so durable—was becoming difficult to procure.
Meanwhile, customers were being lured by promises of
miraculously long-wearing rugs in sales messages that stressed the
nylon content of the new offerings. Such promises were in large part
illusory. This was demonstrated when the du Pont Company reduced
the price of nylon to rug manufacturers. An industry poll was taken to
find out whether this lowering of nylon costs would be reflected in
either lower prices for rugs or in better quality in rugs. The majority
opinion was that there would be no change whatever! Retailing Daily
explained why in these words: "It was frequently pointed out that there
is so much misrepresentation on nylon blends in the retail field that
many customers buying them actually think they are getting all-nylon
carpets. Under these circumstances, obviously there is no
merchandising advantage in increasing the blend. . . . To get a
significant improvement in performance beyond the standard 10%
blend, one must get to fifty percent or more." And Consumer Reports
commented on the "standard 10% blend" by saying, "The rug industry is
frank to say that the percentage of nylon is too small to amount to any
improvement in the quality of the rug. It is there as a sales pitch hook
and, of course, an excuse for a higher price."
The widespread deterioration in rug quality could not be attributed
to any growth in desperation to eke out a few pennies' profit. In 19S9,
when complaints about deterioration in quality of rugs were running
high, U.S. News & World Report published a table showing how sixtynine groups of stocks had fared in Wall Street during the general climb
in stock prices of the preceding year. Stock prices do not necessarily
reflect earnings, but still it is noteworthy that the stocks of the
rugmakers led the entire pack with a rise of 154 per cent. In second
place among the sixty-nine profit makers, incidentally, was "Radio, TV
manufacturing." Its rise in value was 116 per cent.
FURNITURE, INDOOR. Throughout most of the fifties, charges that
the quality of American-made furniture was degenerating were aired in
the trade. Returns in upholstered furniture rose sharply. In the midfifties, a trade wrangle developed because furniture makers refused to
make even a one-year guarantee on the wearing quality or permanency
of color of upholstery fabrics. The head of one upholstering company
said that major troubles were with fabric shrinking, stretching, and
fading. In 1958, a Chicago dealer charged that defects were increasing
at such a rate that most of the stock arriving was in need of some
repairs. The most resounding blast at the furniture industry was aired in
a letter to Retailing Daily 5 signed by "A tired complaint adjuster" who
said that "for obvious reasons" he did not dare to sign his name out of
fear that his store would be blackmailed by the furniture manufacturers.
He began:
"If there is any industry on earth that has reason to hide its head in
shame it is the furniture manufacturers group who have literally 'gotten
away with murder' . . . in hiding the defects of their products. . . ." He
charged that makers were indifferent about inspection. "I can show you
half a dozen makers of upholstered pieces who won't even bother to
reject a sofa if the material is cut too short and pops loose after a few
weeks of wear." He said he was recently "horrified" while visiting one
of the Midwest's leading makers of medium-grade living-room furniture
to notice how many frames made of knotty wood were being used. "No
wonder the epidemic of broken-back sofas that have to be returned," he
said. "Have manufacturers no conscience any more?"
Even the National Retail Dry Goods Association blasted
manufacturers in 1957 for their "faulty manufacturing." The , chief of
one manufacturing firm conceded that the association's charge of sloppy
procedures was well founded. And an officer of the National
Association of Furniture Manufacturers warned at a trade convention
that if the furniture makers didn't "give heed to the quality problem the
public is going to be convinced that modern upholstered furniture is
inferior to that of twenty-five years ago." Apparently it was not only the
public that might be convinced. A partner in the Crown Upholstering
Company lamented: "I have been in the furniture-making business for
almost thirty years and I can honestly say the fabric situation has never
been worse."
All this is not to indicate that durable furniture has disappeared from
the American landscape. When the United States Air Force Academy
was furnishing its buildings, it specified that equipment should be
designed to last for fifty years with a minimum of upkeep. The designer,
Walter Dorwin Teague, designed and selected furnishings accordingly.
He advised: "That means that we try not only to give durability to the
furniture and equipment, but to give durability of style as well."
FURNITURE, OUTDOOR. A sharp downtrend in the quality of
aluminum summer furniture produced many angry outbursts and
defenses in the trade press during the late fifties. One store owner
complained: "Standards have gone to the winds." Specific grievances of
dealers centered on the trend to use more and more insubstantial
material in the chairs. Dealers alleged that:
Manufacturers increasingly were using a gauge of aluminum only
one half as thick as the .065 material they had used a few years earlier.
The breadth of the tubing itself was being narrowed as much as a
quarter inch.
Webbing was thinner and contained fewer strands. Some webbing
had as few as nine strands; and one merchant said such webbing would
quickly give way when people weighing more than 140 pounds sat on
it.
Stainless-steel bolts were giving way to aluminum rivets.
DRAPERY FABRICS. In the summer of 1959, Home Furnishings
Daily reported: "Claims of an all-time low in quality of drapery fabrics
on the market today underlie growing discontent among local dealers
and cut-order jobbers. Sources are deeply concerned over what was
reported to be a staggering amount of poor fabrics coming from
converters and mills." It said complaints seemed to focus most on
misprinted print goods, misweaves in plain goods, and problems with
synthetics, which some dubbed "test tube" fabrics. Meanwhile, Better
Business Bureaus were receiving a flood of complaints about new fabric
combinations which were said to dissolve into their separate parts in the
first dry cleaning.
Many manufacturers of hard and soft goods of the American home
still were striving to increase the durability of their products. But in
general it would appear that durability was knowingly being nibbled
away. The ideal of a "lifetime" product, which once was the shining
goal of makers of a wide range of home products, was reduced for most
to a memory. When we asked Mrs. Brady of Consumers Union for a list
of the products still designed to last a lifetime, she responded: "I can
think of only one—the piano."
Finally, let us note the efforts being made to create the other
controversial kind of obsolescence—obsolescence of desirability—in
the home. Here the obsolescence creators have come up with some of
the most interesting and nonrational results of all.
CHAPTER 11
Fashion Lines for the Kitchen
"If we could get people trading appliances the way they do
automobiles—we'd have it made."—An appliance dealer at a Raleigh,
North Carolina, conference which heard a clamor for more style
changes.
THE SUCCESS OF MOTORCAR MAKERS IN PUTTING MORE CARS ON THE
road by using the strategy of styling attracted the envious interest of
people trying to sell all sorts of goods for the home. That pioneer of
automobile fancification, General Motors' Harley Earl, turned
marketing statesman in the mid-fifties by inviting other industries to
share in the automakers' wonderful formula for everlasting prosperity.
"The bringing about of 'dynamic obsolescence' in other industries," he
stated, "represents one of the greatest challenges to industrial
designers."
His challenge was quickly accepted. Business Week reported that
"other industries—notably electrical appliances—are bringing
themselves up-to-date on the styling concept of Detroit. General
Electric Company representatives spent considerable time at Ford this
summer and fall inquiring into the Ford technique of organizing and
operating a styling department and merchandising the stylist's
products." 1
Another thing that created envy in the appliance industry was the
way the rival motorcar manufacturers managed—despite all the talk
about secrecy—to stress the same new features each year, whether they
be tail fins or eight headlights. Was this the result of clairvoyance,
massive inter-shop spying, or quiet exchange of views at industry-wide
meetings? Some sort of exchange certainly seemed to be involved.
Home Furnishings Daily reported a widespread yearning in the homefurnishing field for more co-ordination in springing innovations on the
public. "There are some who believe the industry's product
improvements have been dissipated because they are too widespread," it
reported. No one firm had all the new features, and rival advertising was
pulling the public in many different directions. It added: "They compare
the appliance business in this case . . . to the car business, where the big
improvements are usually general in any given year, and not limited to
only one firm."
So it was that what industrial designers called the "Detroit
Influence" began spilling over into many lines of marketing. The head
of an institute of appliance manufacturers admonished his members,
"We have got to develop dissatisfied customers."
News began leaking out that appliance makers were attempting to
systematize the creation of obsolescence of desirability. The business
journal Forbes commented in 1956: "Keeping-up-with-the-Jones rivalry
will be exploited by home appliance makers in an upcoming campaign
to convince Americans they should replace refrigerators, ranges, and
washing machines every year or so. . . . Front-running Frigidaire has
already kicked off its sales campaign with a slogan: Planned Product
Obsolescence."
Frigidaire, it should be noted, is a division of General Motors.
Newspapers began carrying reports that soon the housewives of
America would be renewing their kitchens every two or three years with
sparkling-new appliances. When financial columnist Sylvia Porter
heard reports that Frigidaire was embarking on a campaign of
obsolescence creation, she called the head of Frigidaire to ask about
rumors that Frigidaire would have an entirely new trade-in formula. The
Frigidaire chief confirmed the rumor and, she reported, explained: "We
have committed ourselves to a program of Planned Product
Obsolescence." The replacement revolution was on.
A number of months later, during the 1958 recession, Home
Furnishings Daily carried this headline: "Planned Obsolescence Creates
Sharp Rift in Appliance Industry."
It said no other area of the major-appliance business was
commanding so much disagreement as that of the program of planned
obsolescence "under which the industry has been working." The main
grievance causing the "rift" was the widespread feeling that the industry
was still not doing enough to create obsolescence. And the next year the
same journal carried this headline: 2 "Obsolescence to Key
Westinghouse Drive."
Dealers, it explained, were being urged to point out to prospects
"how obsolete 1949 appliances are." In 1960, Consumer Reports quoted
a Westinghouse official on the need of a "new look" every year in order
to assist sales. Complete redesign each year, he said, would be too
costly. "But changes only in decorative trim will satisfy the dealer,
please the customer, and effectively 'obsolete' the previous year's
model."
The home builders and home furnishers, too, were eager to nibble at
the tempting apple of obsolescence creation. When I spoke before a
meeting of a national association in the construction field, a home
builder from central Texas who preceded me shook his fist at the
several hundred builders in the room and told them to get out there and
create more obsolescence. One of the nation's largest mass builders,
John Long of the Phoenix area, began offering new models every six
months. And builders across the land began trade-in plans to encourage
owners of "used" homes to switch to their new homes. Business Week
reported: "The home building industry is finally taking a cue from the
auto industry. . . . Like the auto makers the home builders are trying to
foster 'planned obsolescence' by putting more emphasis on styling, etc."
People who couldn't afford an all-new home were urged at least to
spruce up by buying new fixtures for their "used homes."
Home builders began talking excitedly about the House of
Tomorrow, which will come in sections, and all or part of the house can
be traded in for a new model. The kitchen of tomorrow is to be bought
as a unit, with annual model changes available for the discontented.
Appliance companies were reported considering building entire
prefabricated walls and even rooms with their appliances built in. The
whole wall could be traded in. Business Week reported that homeowners
would be encouraged to trade in a room just as they now trade in their
car on a new model. And it added that there would be "national brand
advertising to see that they do."
As for home furnishings aside from appliances, here are a few of the
specific home furnishings where plans for obsolescence creation were
going forward:
CHINA AND GLASS. Retailing Daily reported: "Take a hint from the
auto manufacturers: play up newness; make the public conscious of
their old glass and china. Let them know it is stylistically obsolete." 3
FURNITURE. Home Furnishings Daily, quoting the counsel of Louis
Cheskin of the Color Research Institute: "The manufacturers' next step
is to promote psychological obsolescence . . . promote one specific
design—possibly limited to one or two pieces of furniture every year . .
. [this] should be promoted in conjunction with a brand image as a
symbol of up-to-dateness for that particular year. Every five years a
completely new grouping should be promoted. . . . In other words, a
minor change every year, a major one every five years." 4
BEDS. United States Steel, a major producer of bedsprings, in 1960
prepared a massive campaign to change American ideas about the right
size for a bed. It hoped to swing North Americans away from the longstandard fifty-four-inch double bed to oversized and twin beds. United
States Steel was reported prepared to spend a million dollars to put
consumers and retailers into a mood to yearn for larger beds. Its
campaign was called "Space for Sleeping." In this drive it had the cooperation of bedding manufacturers, who also would benefit by any
outmoding of the standard bed since there would be an increased
demand for larger mattresses, frames, sheets, and all the other fixings.
SEWING MACHINES. A letter written by the public-relations
consultant of a major sewing-machine company revealed the president's
plans for launching new models. It said: "The regular introduction of a
new line ought to lead, he feels, to the obsolescence psychology so
important to autos, refrigerators, etc."
FLOOR COVERINGS. The assistant general sales manager of
Armstrong Cork Company was reported as stating: "[his] company has
developed a program of planned obsolescence designed to bring a
change in product acceptance every five years."
BATHROOM SCALES. One major manufacturer of scales was
reported to be embarked on a plan to come up with new designs that
would make obsolete the scales that are already in 60 per cent of
American homes.
The specific styling techniques that were perfected to out-mode the
home products already owned by Americans were interesting for their
ingenuity and bore more than a little resemblance to the techniques used
by the automobile designers.
For one thing, they sought to modify the profile or silhouette of
many of their products, just as automobile designers had squashed down
their product during the fifties. The automobile designers had stumbled
upon the streamlined, teardrop shape as a symbol of modernity. This
shape, which came from the discoveries of aircraft designers, had less
but some plausible functional relevance in automobile design. But the
relevance of the teardrop look became completely unclear when applied
to such things as refrigerators, stoves, meat-grinder handles, electric
irons, orange juicers, and radios. Wind resistance seems a strange
preoccupation for the designers of such products.
By the late fifties the teardrop had run its course. Very shortly after
refrigerator makers began talking about the imperative need for planned
obsolescence to cope with mounting inventories, refrigerators abruptly
received a new shape. Suddenly they no longer seemed designed for
flight with rounded corners and oval contours. The new refrigerators
were boxes again, with sharply squared corners. With impressive
unanimity the major refrigerator makers discovered the square look. I
have before me pictures of seven major brands in 1959. All seven have
the severely straight lines of a rectangular slab with sharp, square
corners. By the spring of 1960, a trade journal was reporting that
appliance makers were starting to push two-door refrigerators in "their
efforts to break up the growing log jam of refrigerator inventory," The
log jam amounted to nearly 800,000 unsold units on hand.
The television manufacturers sought to modify the profile of their
product by a different approach. In 1957, when sales turned sluggish,
the cry went up for a drastic change that would outmode existing sets or
would persuade people to buy a second set. The industry responded by
unveiling the new Slim Look. Sets abruptly became—or seemed to
become—shallower. To achieve the slim profile, the makers used a
squat 110-degree picture tube instead of the regular 90-degree tube.
Companies competed to see which could get out the slimmest set.
By 1958, Sylvania was promoting in large advertisements its
"Sylouette," which it claimed had a "cabinet only ten inches deep."
Technically that was correct. But the tube mask bulged three inches out
in front of the cabinet, and the tube guard bulged three inches out to the
rear of the cabinet, to give the set itself a total thickness of sixteen
inches.
The functional excuse for this race to a new slim profile was that it
would permit the set to fit into a bookcase. This, however, hardly
seemed to be a crying need, since most television-set owners did not
own bookcases. Karl Nagel, chief of television testing for Consumers
Union, said the Slim Look was "only to create obsolescence." When I
asked an engineering executive of one of the largest television-set
manufacturers about the trend to slim sets, he shrugged and said, "Just
style."
Mr. Nagel pointed out that the slim set with its squat 110-degree
tube did not produce as good a picture as many 90-degree tubes, since
certain types of 110-degree tubes developed considerable optical
distortion. Furthermore, all the components of the chassis had to be
specially mounted for slim sets, so that they became much harder for a
serviceman to get at.
Another tack taken in producing obsolescence was in the use of
colors. The chairman of the Color Standardization Committee of the
Institute of Appliance Manufacturers helped lead the way in this by
pointing out in 1956 that color could be the "greatest technique for
creating obsolescence in the major appliance industry." 5 He suggested
that the appliance industry get behind a program of color changes, and
that the members "quit having a guilty complex" about the idea of
finding an orderly and economic method for satisfying consumer
desires. He added, "That is to say, if color will help sell goods, let's use
color and use it as an efficient sales tool."
For a few years appliance showrooms became a riot of pastel colors.
The white refrigerator left in a home began looking like a relic of a
bygone era. The stylists' fascination with pastels exhausted itself before
the fifties ended, and the trend in color went right back to white, with
some venturing into fancification with tracery effects. Left in the
backwash of the change were several hundred thousand homeowners
who had believed pastel to be the wave of the future.
The marketers also made heavy use of gadgets and trim to create a
new look. Stoves and washing machines were emblazoned with control
panels suggesting they were prepared to take off for outer space. I
counted thirty-five buttons and dials on one Hotpoint gas stove. Others
had almost as many. Consumers Union found instances, upon
dismantling stoves, where certain of the dials had no connection
underneath the cover. They were dummies.
The complex panels also served another purpose. They flattered the
housewife's ego. Only she, it was implied in the promotions, was
capable of mastering such a magnificent scientific instrument. This
motivation was pointed up in Product Engineering in a discussion of
the guilt feeling many homemakers had nowadays because homemaking
was being made too easy for them with all the easy-does-it automatic
appliances. The report explained that this "guilt feeling has been
overcome in designing automatic appliances by putting great emphasis
on complex-looking dash-panel assemblies to house the controls.
Through such design techniques we compensate for the latent 'guilt
feeling' of the user by giving her controls and pushbuttons she alone can
use creatively."
Or take two other innovations that were hailed as steps forward but
might just as properly be characterized perhaps as planned obsolescence
by running up and down stairs.
In the early days of television all sets had transformers. Around
1951, sets were unveiled without transformers, and this "advance" was
proclaimed as making the sets better, more modern, and more
fashionable. Then in 1959, several major companies began proudly
unveiling new sets that had transformers again. These new sets were
said to be safer and better performing than the old-fashioned
transformerless sets!
The other example is the turn-around shelf in refrigerators. General
Electric introduced such a feature as a great boon to the housewife.
Then in December, 1958, a trade journal carried this complaint made by
an appliance dealer: "We were just getting a tremendous public
acceptance on the GE turn-around shelves when GE dropped them.
We're getting tired of building up a demand for new gadgets only to
have the manufacturer drop them for another gimmick."
Mass home builders, too, were experimenting with the possibilities
of creating obsolescence of desirability through the development of
styling trends. During the late fifties, lattice windows and other smallpaned windows were being introduced in mass-produced homes in
many parts of the nation. In the West and parts of the Midwest, a
Cinderella house was being promoted. It had latticed windows, steeply
pitched roof, scalloped eaves. James Mills, who serves as a consultant
on marketing strategies for builders throughout the nation, told me that
builders are not unaware that small windows and steep roofs, if widely
accepted, can create obsolescence in existing houses. The trend to small
windows might, for example, outmode every home in the nation with a
picture window.
As for the steep roof, many builders hope that, too, is a trend. A
number of builders hoped or anticipated that the exterior profile of
homes would shift away from the horizontal look exemplified by the
ranch house of the fifties to more upright lines, just as the motorcar was
moving toward verticality. David Muss, who had built nearly a quarterbillion dollars' worth of homes, announced firmly in 1960: "The twostory house is coming back."
In the appliance field a good deal of uneasiness was developing
about the growing reliance upon planned obsolescence of desirability.
Some within the trade castigated "phony obsolescence" and "warmedover face-lifted phonies." Still, as E. B. Weiss of Advertising Age
pointed out, the resistance to bringing out a new model annually in both
the appliance and automobile field was but "a tiny trend." He felt that
despite all the lip service "in the end, competitive necessity calls the
tune." Still, he hoped some progress could be made against some of the
"chicanery," "fluff," and "nonsense" during the sixties.
We now say farewell for the moment to planned obsolescence both
of desirability and of quality. The best brief summary of the cost of all
this built-in obsolescence to the public is offered by Dexter W. Masters,
director of Consumers Union, who states:
"When design is tied to sales rather than to product function, as it is
increasingly, and when marketing strategy is based on frequent style
changes, there are certain almost inevitable results: a tendency to the
use of inferior materials; short cuts in the time necessary for sound
product development; and a neglect of quality and adequate inspection.
The effect of such built-in obsolescence is a disguised price increase to
the consumer in the form of shorter product life and, often, heavier
repair bills."
The repair bills Americans were encountering—as they reflected an
effort to keep the nation's output of goods and services mounting—
deserve a separate brief inspection.
CHAPTER 12
The Repairman's Paradise
"When a $300 fully-automatic washer with whistles and bells on it
won't run properly, it's not as effective as the medieval practice of
beating clothes on rocks."—GEORGE YOUNG, president of the
Cincinnati Better Business Bureau.1
AMERICANS WHO STILL BOTHERED TO KEEP BOOKS ON THEIR SPENDING
were finding that a greater portion of their income each year was going
to repair their cars, appliances, furniture, and other possessions. In
hundreds of American cities, people had become so harassed by the
problems of coping with a variety of repairmen that for an annual fee—
and 10 per cent of all the bills—they were channeling their calls for
help through an intermediary or clearinghouse.
As automation wiped out hundreds of thousands of jobs in goodsproducing industries, the slack was being taken up to a large extent by
new openings in the service industries. One of the great and growing
service industries was product repair. By 1960, the nation had twice as
many repairmen—or about two million—as it did before World War II.
And companies building replacement parts frequently were enjoying a
greater volume of business than the makers of the products. Sylvania's
director of research predicted in 1960 that within three years Americans
would be spending two and a half times as much a year for television
service, parts, and installation as they would be paying for new
television sets. An official of Kelvinator estimated that Americans were
paying sixteen billion dollars a year for service on all products—and
would be paying nearly twice that by 1975.
In 1960, a spokesman for Kelvinator, announcing his company's
determination to concentrate on making basic improvements as they
could be developed and to avoid making an annual overhaul, observed
that such a course would enable Kelvinator to slash in half its rate of
service calls on automatic washers during their first year of operation.
The large makers of motorcars, appliances, and other products
moved in to share in this exploding field by setting up servicing
organizations—and thus expanding their total volume of business. The
servicing organization affiliated with a major television manufacturer,
as an example, began handling nearly half of all calls for servicing
ailing color television sets. The head of this group pointed out to a
convention of dealers in Chicago that the more money people can be
persuaded to pay for a new television set, the more freely they will be
willing to pay for servicing without haggling. One reason that charges
for service on a color set can be higher than on a black-and-white set, he
explained, "is [that] the customer has paid more for his set and,
therefore, is adjusted to pay more for servicing that set." He concluded
by saying, "The future of the servicing industry is extremely bright and
profitable."
There were charges that some manufacturers were encouraging their
dealers to sell the products themselves at cost if necessary in order to
make their real profit out of their servicing operation. A car dealer
complained to a Senate subcommittee that an official of the company
producing the cars he sold had criticized him for not finding more
things wrong with the cars brought into his garage. He wasn't doing
enough to promote the sale of parts.
Many repairmen, whether company affiliated or independent, were
developing a zest for repairing and replacing parts that became a
phenomenon of the times. The president of a national electronic
servicing association observed (possibly in a jovial mood) a few years
ago: "What we'd evidently like to see is a TV set that works perfectly
for the first thirty days but breaks down regularly every thirty days
thereafter" (after the warranty is up).
Another amiable comment worth noting on the attitude of many
repairmen was that offered by the chairman of a national association of
dealers. In the late fifties he said: 2 "Unfortunately we have forgotten
how to charge for service." He then told how an optometrist he had
heard of worked. After the optometrist had fitted a customer with
glasses, he would tell the customer that the charge was ten dollars. If the
customer didn't blink, he followed with, "For the frames, and ten dollars
for the lenses." He added, "We should learn from this how to inform our
customers of service prices." (Later the same year, Time magazine
carried a report that in Detroit twenty out of twenty-two repairmen spot
checked had proved to be overcharging for work.)
Automatic washers and dishwashers were requiring an average of
two service calls during the first year of operation. Television sets were
requiring 1.4 calls the first year, and electric driers and refrigerators
were quite likely to require at least one call the first year. On some
"epidemic items"—brand models rushed into production with little
testing—breakdown rates ran much higher. Behind much of the product
failure was lack of quality control—or quality deliberately controlled to
a short-life level. And behind much of the high cost of product
maintenance were buck-happy repairmen. In many communities,
however—and my own included—the repairmen are mostly competent,
conscientious, and dedicated.
Beyond all these factors of debasement of quality and banditry by
repairmen there were several objective factors about modern appliances
that helped make them expensive to maintain and that helped increase
the business volume of servicing agencies or replacement-parts
manufacturers, and, in some cases, the manufacturers hoping to sell new
replacement units. For example:
There were more things to go wrong. Those added luxury features
that so delight copy writers were adding to the prone-ness of products to
break down.
The rush to extras on washing machines in the form of cycle
controls, additive injectors, increased the number of things that can
develop ailments. The Wall Street Journal noted: "Parts and accessory
dealers naturally are pleased with the added extras put on new cars."
They should be. I have two neighbors who bought station wagons in
1956. One bought a model with power steering, power brakes,
automatic shifting, power windows. The other—a curmudgeon type
who doesn't think that shifting gears and raising windows by hand are
too much of a strain—bought a car without any of the extras. His years
of ownership of the car have been relatively trouble free. (And by
spurning the extras he saved several hundred dollars at the outset.) The
other neighbor who bought the car with all the extras moans that he got
a "lemon." His car, he states, has been laid up at the garage seven times,
usually because of malfunctioning of the optional equipment.
Replacement parts were costing more. The gismoed motorcar was a
good case in point. A creased fender that in earlier years could be
straightened for a few dollars was now, with "integral paneling" and
high-styled sculpturing, likely to cost $100 to correct. The wrap-around
windshield was likely to cost three to five times as much to replace as
the unbent windshields that motorcars had before the fifties.
Ailing parts were increasingly inaccessible. In their preoccupation
with gadgetry and production short cuts—and perhaps obsolescence
creation—manufacturers often gave little thought to the problem of
repairing their products (or deliberately made them hard to repair).
Sales Management commented that "products are not designed for
service." It told of a steam iron that could be repaired only by breaking
it apart and drilling out the screws. Some toasters were so riveted
together that a repairman had to spend nearly an hour just getting to the
working part. And many complex appliances had to be largely
dismantled in order to replace a fifteen-cent light or a ten-cent spring.
Product analysts at Consumers Union told me that air-conditioning units
in automobiles were often cluttering up the engine compartment so
badly that it took an hour or two to remove a rear spark plug. Built-in
appliances—which were being hailed as the wave of the future—had to
be disengaged from the wall before repair work could begin. Many of
these built-ins were simply standard units without coasters and could be
repaired only from the rear.
Repairing had come a long way from the day when Henry Ford I
built his cars so that any owner could handle all repairs with the help of
a simple set of tools that Mr. Ford provided. A Ford dealer in the late
fifties complained to a Senate subcommittee that he often had to buy up
to three hundred dollars' worth of special tools every time a new model
came out. A television repairman who arrived at my house with a vast
kit of equipment told my wife he couldn't even carry all he needed these
days because of all the changes in component design, which he felt
were often pointless.
Necessary parts were often hard to obtain. An acquaintance told me
she had to get along for nine years with a plastic control knob missing
from her gas range because she couldn't buy a replacement. Finally, out
of embarrassment, she got rid of the stove even though it still worked
satisfactorily. The plastic knob had snapped off soon after the stove was
purchased. A man on Long Island related angrily that his $2,000 pump
became useless within two years because a two-dollar part that had
broken was no longer obtainable.
Some companies have gone to great lengths to keep supplies of
replacement parts. Maytag boasts that it can replace any part on any
washer it has made in the past thirty-three years. But only a few
companies could make the same claim, or probably would care to.
When I have questioned them, they have usually responded that they
maintain replacement parts "as long as a demand for them exists." The
demand, however, was likely to mean a profitable demand. Another
problem was that the wave of mergers, especially in the appliance field,
had left many products orphaned. The company absorbing your brand
usually has no more than nominal sympathy for your troubles with the
product that was made before they took control of the company. Still
another problem was the bewildering variety of models that each major
company produced each year. In the jungle of similar-but-different
models it was often extremely difficult for even the most conscientious
repairman to stock knobs or timers for every variant.
Manufacturers often failed to provide information that would
facilitate repairs. Recently, The Boston Herald editorially protested that
appliance manufacturers were getting so "cozy" with service manuals
that customers seeking them got the impression they were "censored as
if they contained obscene material." The Electric Appliance Service
News likewise expressed indignation on behalf of servicemen, or at
least independent servicemen. It said, "Our mail is loaded with gripes
daily from servicemen throughout the country lamenting their inability
to obtain service manuals from certain manufacturers." Often this
coziness has sprung from the desire of the manufacturer to keep the
repair business to itself and out of the hands of independents. The News
charged that "some manufacturers do not make service manuals
available to all independent repairmen and therefore it is almost
impossible to make repairs easily and properly—and at a time-saving
expense."
Another problem was that the manufacturers often hid the model
number near the bottom of the refrigerator or in the pit beneath the
burners in a gas stove. The manufacturers of many products have never
even bothered to agree—in all their trade meetings—where the model
number should be placed. And no replacement of parts can be made
until the model number is located.
The trend was to encourage customers to replace parts rather than
to bother repairing them. If the manufacturers could not persuade
people to throw away the whole product and buy a new one, then the
next best thing was to persuade them to throw away parts. The high cost
of repair work was also a factor here. Business Week reported that
"garages, service stations and dealers now have the attitude that it is
much cheaper to replace a defective carburetor, say, with a new or
rebuilt one than to fix it." A television announcer extolling the wonders
of the sponsor's cigarette lighter stated that if the lighter became
defective it could be fixed in a jiffy just by replacing the entire lighter
mechanism. On the other hand, it should be noted that one of the very
few companies left in North America that offer an absolutely
unconditional lifetime guarantee on their products for both parts and
labor is the ZIPPO lighter manufacturer.
The increasing difficulties of the housewife in keeping her
multitude of products in good working order were perhaps best summed
up by the late Bernard De Voto when he said: "If a 50-cent belt in the
vacuum cleaner wears out, the agency will not replace it in less than six
weeks and not then until a series of young men have tried to sell her a
new machine, alleging that hers is antiquated."
CHAPTER 13
Progress Through
Planned Chaos
"We get our best prices on sales days. With the sales spirit in the
air the customer usually assumes your prices are real low. . . .I make
this mass sales hysteria work to my advantage."—An appliance dealer
in Astoria, New York.1
THE DICTIONARY ON MY DESK DEFINES RAZZLE-DAZZLE AS "A STATE
or event of confusion, bewilderment, bustling." Marketers concerned
with developing strategies for expanding sales in the face of the specter
of satiation were finding that a state of "confusion, bewilderment,
bustling" was often the ideal one in which to operate. They were not
just negligent in not giving consumers information needed for making
prudent purchasing decisions. Frequently they engaged in deliberate
obfuscation of values.
Most Americans above the really poor like to splurge and can
splurge most easily if they can assure themselves that somehow they are
getting a bargain. And some could vent their latent sadism by taking
advantage of the dire circumstances forcing the merchant to make a
sacrifice. The merchants accordingly placed themselves in the posture
of desperation. The "bargains" they offered were in many cases the kind
that would enable the customers to turn in their old power cruiser on a
new bigger one complete with sundeck and ship-to-shore telephone.
In such situations it was essential that the customer not have any
easy way of knowing how much real value was promised by the price
tag. Two informed comments suggest the state of affairs that has
developed in the modern American market place:
"We have reached the point where price lists are no longer prices;
they are simply advertising devices."—An official of the Federal Trade
Commission.
"For a widening range of goods only a sucker pays list prices."—
Consumer Reports.
Value had become the hidden ball, and sometimes the seemingly
irrelevant factor. The product analysts at Consumers Union who judged
the performance of twenty-two automatic electric toasters a few years
ago found that the best buy at that time for over-all quality was a $14.50
toaster. On the other hand, a toaster priced at $39.50 ranked twelfth
among the "acceptable" toasters. And of the three toasters rated as
"unacceptable," all three cost considerably more than the $14.50 "Best
Buy." (In a subsequent test toaster qualities seemed more in line with
price differentials.)
Colston Warne, Amherst economist and president of Consumers
Union, has concluded that there is slight if any correlation between the
price and quality of much of the branded goods offered on the market.
He pointed out that "one may, for example, buy inferior margarine at
any price between 22 cents and 44 cents a pound; one can buy the
highest grade on the other hand for either 23 cents, 27 cents, or 40
cents." The cost of manufacturing a product had less and less relation to
the price that marketers might decide for strategic reasons to set on the
product.
Much of the obfuscation of value was created behind the screen of
the trade-in lure. The high trade-in had proved to be enormously
effective in luring prospects who already owned the product being
offered. In many lines, however, offering to accept trade-ins raised a
problem. There was little demand for used refrigerators, washing
machines, electric razors. In some lines the goods accepted in trade
were widely regarded as nuisances that had to be endured. Yet the
pretense had to be maintained that the trade-in was valuable.
An anonymous salesman who discussed selling strategies in a Home
Furnishings Daily series told how to cope with the prospect who
springs a trade-in on you unexpectedly. He wrote: "In case someone
walks in practically wearing a badge proclaiming 'I have a trade-in'
naturally I boost my prices to accommodate him. [However] If a
customer should hit me between the eyes with his 1947 Frostcool just
when I've got a deal clinched I have two choices. First is to allow no
more than $10 or $15 for the old box, then try to add it back in as
service and delivery charges. Second is to tell him pointblank that the
old box is worthless and that I am doing him a favor taking it away."
The strategy of upping the price to cover the trade-in allowance—
called "the packed price"—was, of course, widely used in automobile
merchandising until a federal law required the posting of a "suggested"
price at the factory, which made packing more difficult. However, price
packing was still widely used in the appliance field.
An example of the chaos that could be achieved by the trade-in
device occurred in the electric-razor field. One firm was offering a fivedollar trade-in allowance for "anything that shaves." And a trade journal
reported that many outlets offering to take the trade-ins on the various
brands of razors they were selling "will easily oblige without a physical
trade-in." The trade-in, in short, had become a price-juggling device.
And one New York discounter ran advertisements offering Remington
electric shavers that carried a list price of $29.50 for $10.97 if the
customer had a trade-in, or for $15.47 if he didn't have a trade-in. By
1959, several of the major shaver makers were quietly withdrawing
their trade-in offer. Sunbeam, which led the withdrawals, explained that
the trade-ins had become a nuisance to dealers and distributors.
A young New York City housewife, Jean Banks, described to me
her bewilderment regarding values in supermarkets as she pushes her
little cart through miles of aisles. She explained: "If my grandma
wanted to know anything about what she was buying, she would ask her
grocer. I've never seen my grocer. I think he lives in Scarsdale.
Grandma paid the same price whenever she bought a particular product.
I have to be a mathematician to figure out if it would be cheaper to buy
two packages for the price of one; to buy one package at the full price
but use my 25¢-off coupon; to buy three packages and get my purchase
price for two of them refunded by sending in three boxtops; to buy two
for 29¢ or three for 44¢; or to buy one package at the full price and use
the boxtop entry blank to enter a contest where I may win my height in
silver dollars. It's all very complex."
The editor of Progressive Grocer confided to his grocer readers that
"goods we want to push are priced 'two for,' 'three for,' or 'ten for.'" And
he added: "Some women even think that's the only way the store will
sell the item."
One soap manufacturer proclaimed a "½ price sale" for a three-bar
package. It turned out, if the buyer read the small type, that he was
really being offered two of the bars at full price and the third bar at the
half price.
Housewives across the nation were becoming so overloaded with
dinnerware that came in detergent boxes—and displacing needed
detergent—that they were running out of shelf space. A Ford dealer in
Westchester County, New York, was offering free mink stoles with
each automobile sold. Perhaps the most astounding offer, however, was
that of an appliance store in Lafayette, Louisiana. To each person
willing to buy certain of its deluxe electric ranges at the regular
suggested retail price, it promised to furnish three rooms of the
customer's home. It would give away free a living-room set, a bedroom
set, and a dinette set! With this and other lures the store sold $42,000
"worth" of major appliances in four days. In the late fifties reports
circulated that in central Ohio morticians were offering green stamps to
clients; but there is no evidence that such offers are being made today.
The game of printing price tags and price lists consumed a great
deal of the marketers' creative thinking. So much "pre-ticketing" was
being done that the Federal Trade Commission expressed concern. In
pre-ticketing you print price tags with blue-sky prices and then slash
them with a heavy black pencil to emphasize your desperate state. A
new bargain price is entered. In 1958, Printers' Ink carried this
headline: "FICTITIOUS PRICE ADVERTISING IS LIKE SIN—EVERYONE'S
AGAINST IT, BUT ALMOST EVERYONE ENGAGES IN IT
OCCASIONALLY."
The ads were likely to use such phrases as "regularly——,"
"usually——," or "made to sell for——." Watches were an example of
products that seldom sold for their supposedly regular price. A blanket
distributor provided tags on which the merchant could print whatever
list price struck his fancy, but the blankets were to sell for $8.95. The
Federal Trade Commission issued a complaint against Howard Stores
Corporation, a nationwide clothing chain, for using such advertisements
as "$49.55, usually $70." It said, "Howard never sold any of the
advertised merchandise at the purported regular price." A survey of
appliance prices that covered nine famous name-brand items showed
that none of these items were being sold at the list price in any of thirty
stores checked in eight cities.
When the Federal Trade Commission singled out a furniture store in
Washington, D.C., for advertising to consumers that they could "save
$80" from regular furniture prices, the store offered an interesting and
belligerent defense. The store contended that the term "regular" as used
in the trade didn't really mean the regular price charged but meant the
price the furniture could be sold for if the "regular" markup was applied.
It proceeded to blast the meddling Federal Trade Commission for being
so "overprotective" of consumers that it would ultimately produce a
"race of idiot consumers" who would be at the mercy of sharp sellers if
they ever stepped foot outside the protected shores of the United States.
Another selling strategy that had become so prevalent that the
"overprotective" Federal Trade Commission was disturbed was the
practice of proclaiming "bargains on a string." A seemingly fantastic
bargain is advertised to lure prospects when there is no intent of actually
selling such a product. The bargain offered has disappeared by the time
prospects begin beating on the door. Or the ten-cubic-foot refrigerator
offered for $119 to attract prospects turns out to be a discolored box
made by a firm that disappeared in a merger some years back. But the
store does just happen to have some really excellent bargains just
marked down from a fanciful regular price.
In the wilderness of tire marketing, obfuscation of value was
additionally produced by the strategy of planned chaos of nomenclature.
The industry refused to set any standards to control what tires could
properly be labeled "first line," "second line," or "third line." And the
names the tire marketers dreamed up for their various "lines" of tires
often offered the tire buyer no clue to the quality he was buying. Here,
for example, were three tires offered by Firestone in 1958: Firestone
Super Champion, Firestone Deluxe Champion, Firestone Deluxe Super
Champion.
Which would you say was the first-line tire? Number three? You are
wrong. That was the second-line tire. The first-line tire was number
two.
One basic measurement of the quality of a tire is the number of
miles its tread will last. Analysts at Consumers Union found that there
was only a general likelihood that first-line tires would give more
mileage than second-line tires. In 1959, one of the four tires found to
give the most miles per dollar was B. F. Goodrich's second-line rayon
tube-type tire. And among thirteen first-line nylon tires of one size
tested, the amount of miles that could be expected ranged from 28,600
down to 18,400.
A second basic measurement of tire quality is carcass strength, a
safeguard against blowouts. Consumer Bulletin reported in 1958 that
Motor Vehicle Research, Inc., found in testing three hundred tires that
"the cheapest lines of the makes tested were found to have better
carcass strength than so-called 100-level or first-line tires. In one make,
the first-line tire was the poorest of all tested while its third-line tire was
the best of all tested in strength of carcass."
In some fields where prices had only slight relation to quality or
cost of production, the prices were set on the basis of psychological
considerations. Many marketers in the Alice-in-Wonderland economy
of modern-day America found they could raise their total number of
sales by raising the prices they charged. Marketing strategist Louis
Cheskin warned producers that "many a product fails because . . . the
price was too low." 2 It doesn't have a "quality" image that a higher price
tag can give. A Western manufacturer of cosmetics who acknowledged
marking up some of his products 900 per cent was quoted as explaining:
"A cheap line wouldn't do well. Women wouldn't be caught dead telling
their friends they bought cheap cosmetics."
The cost of the lipstick sold in a fashionable store often is only a
penny or two more than the lipstick sold in a five-and-ten-cent store; yet
the fashionable store may charge $1 or $2 more for it. In one case a
company offered two brands of lipstick. One cost the buyer twice as
much as the other. Both lipsticks used the same formula. A cosmetics
company expanding overseas is finding that it can sell nail enamel to
natives of the Congo. Many of the native women can afford—at the
prices charged—to buy only enough enamel to cover one fingernail. But
that seems to give them pleasure. Perhaps they will hound their
husbands to work harder so that they, the wives, can cover more of their
nails with enamel. Still another company was hailed in a marketing
journal because it had succeeded in raising the price level of all
cosmetics. For example, it boldly began selling nail polish at a price 500
per cent higher than its competitors. This, one gathered, was real
marketing statesmanship.
In general, the trend was toward competing in such factors as image
building, styling, packaging, preferred shelf position, and premiums
rather than on price. According to one estimate, half of all small
electrical housewares manufactured in the United States were being
bought as premiums by the trading-stamp companies. All these
promotional approaches, of course, raised the price of food sold in
supermarkets. They also gave the big company—as in the automotive
field—an edge over the challenging newcomer who didn't have the
resources to hammer home an image. As economist Colston Warne has
pointed out, "One of the important functions of advertising is the
creation of a haven from price competition."
Possibly some of this general disdain for price competition that has
developed simply reflects the prevailing mood of a people in an era of
abundance and abandon. Some marketing experts argued that as a
society attains more and more abundance price as a decisive factor
tends to retreat into the background. Pierre Martineau, research and
marketing director of The Chicago Tribune, reports that a survey made
for one national chain suggested that only a third of the women
shoppers studied were economy-minded, while almost as large a group
saw the shopping expedition as "fundamentally social." 3 They were
looking for a friendly, congenial environment. Many were newcomers
in the areas studied; and the stores and their personnel were becoming
substitutes for the friends they had left behind.
Whatever the reasons, startling similarities in the prices charged by
supposedly relentless rivals began appearing. This would suggest that
prices were chaotic only when the marketers desired them to be.
Consider the evidence of groupthink in the tire market, which appeared
a few pages ago to be so chaotic. The tire makers could not agree on
minimum standards for a "first-line" tire; yet in their list prices they
showed astounding unanimity of thought. Consumer Reports noted in
July, 1959, that despite extreme variations in tread wear found in first-,
second-, and third-line tires "the Big Four manufacturers' suggested list
prices for these lines were phenomenally similar. On first-line nylon
tubeless 6.70-15 blackwall tires the list price for each of these brands
was $37.06. In the 7.50-14 nylon tubeless versions the list price of
$38.81 for these Big Four brands also did not vary by even so much as a
penny."
The Report of the Senate Subcommittee on Antitrust and Monopoly
of the Judiciary Committee (85th Congress) on administered prices in
the motorcar industry noted a similar extraordinary coincidence. It
observed that "differences in price for comparable models of the major
producers have been all but obliterated." It found a "striking uniformity"
of prices among the three major producers. In some cases it related,
there was actual identity in price to the last dollar; in the majority of
cases, the companies were within a few dollars of each other. This was
particularly true of General Motors and Ford; in the case of Chrysler, a
traditional margin of about $20 usually prevailed over the prices of its
competitors, it said.
The president of General Motors announced in the mid-fifties that
"price cutting should not be a factor in competition." His views
prevailed. When the 1957-58 recession developed, and the motorcar
market was glutted, the major motorcar makers chose cutting
production to cutting prices. And this was the general pattern set by
American marketers.
Historically, recessions have corrected the inflationary prices that
have developed in times of rising prosperity. But in the 1957-58
recession the marketers refused to let prices follow the normal
downward adjustment to lessened demand. And after this recession had
ended and businessmen were congratulating themselves for holding
prices firm, Sales Management asked its marketing readers:
"Did you prolong the recession? That's a nervy question, isn't it?
But seriously, now that most of the panic is over, do you feel that you
did the right things . . . ? Did you cut prices below a sensible level? Did
you try to sell your product or simply undersell competitors? Did you
emphasize price above product? Or did you justify your fair price to
your customers? Did you cut advertising to save money?"
Quite possibly, in an era of abundance, cutting production rather
than prices is a justifiable response to lessened demand. It at least
reduces the drain on resources. But the head of the Federal Reserve
Bank of Chicago commented that the new ability of industry to increase
prices in the face of falling demand meant that industrial leaders were
embracing "a new, a novel and a frightening theory of consumer
demand."
There was widespread acceptance among marketers, at least until
the sixties began, that creeping inflation—or ever-higher prices—had
become a permanent part of the American way of life. And consumers
had learned to agree. Inflation was accepted as "normal" as long as the
nation had full employment and an ever-increasing man-hour
productivity rate, with labor and stockholders splitting the benefits of
the man-hour gain rather than passing them on to the general consuming
public in the form of lower prices.
And this general resignation to price upcreep became in itself a
significant sales goad to keep customers coming. The public was told—
apparently correctly—that nothing would ever again be as cheap
tomorrow as it was today. So hurry, hurry, hurry. A housing developer
on Long Island warned prospects to hurry because his houses were
being raised $1,000 in price a month hence. And the appliance
salesman-author who did a series on sales techniques confided how he
worries an undecided prospect by disclosing that "prices are going up
on these goods." As a convincer he pulls from the drawer a handful of
undated manufacturers' bulletins announcing imminent price rises. He
has saved them over the years for just this use.
There was, by late 1960, the possibility that overabundance of
goods—plus the pressure of foreign price competition—would
ultimately force a halt to reliance upon creeping inflation. But this
possibility remained to be tested. As the sixties were about to begin,
Sales Management advised its readers that for better or worse they
should assume that they would "have to increase the price of their
product one or more times a year during the next decade." (The italics
are mine.) And it warned: "You will probably want to consider frequent
introduction of new models with new price tags so that you can argue
that the higher price is buying superior features."
CHAPTER 14
Selling on the Never-Never
"INSTANT MONEY-CASH LOANS WITHIN 20 SECONDS"—An
advertisement on behalf of Georgia's Citizens & Southern National
Bank system.
AS THE WANTS AND NEEDS OF MOST AMERICANS BECAME LESS AND
less insistent owing to the general upsurging of material abundance, the
mass sellers achieved new break-throughs in devising techniques to
make the buying of products "easy." Spectacular gains were made in
perfecting ways to help—and induce—Americans to buy more and
more against future earnings. Admen began referring to the strategy of
selling on credit as one of the great "creative" forces in the American
economy. An official of the National Retail Merchants Association
asserted that credit was becoming "a way of life in this country."
When the American Bankers Association met in Chicago during the
late fifties, a principal speaker was Charles H. Brower, head of the
Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn advertising agency. Sales were then
lagging. He stated: "If we are to break the present economic log jam,
you installment-credit bankers and we in advertising must do it by
working together." He urged the bankers to get into the swing of
advanced merchandising techniques in order to make borrowing from
them both moral and fun. The lending man, he said, should "get up from
his desk, and smile and shake hands with the prospective borrower, no
matter how poor a credit risk he appeared to be."
Loan-company officials at a conference were admonished by a
psychological consultant to use "positive" rather than "negative"
appeals. They were told that the average American still had oldfashioned puritanical ideas about money and going into debt. This
prospective borrower must be assured that what he is doing in seeking a
loan is not shameful but is rather a forward-looking step. The borrower
must feel "I am on my way up. I am taking out an advance payment on
my invested earning power next year."
Under the new pressures, credit changed from being a simple
financial aid to being an active sales tool. More and more retailers were
discovering that it was no longer enough merely to have a credit plan
available for consumers. It was also considered imperative to promote
the use of credit. An appliance center in Albuquerque, New Mexico,
began requesting that credit applicants list the names and addresses of
three friends or relatives. These references named soon received a letter
from the store stating: "Dear Friend: Yesterday we had the great
pleasure of opening an installment account for——. When they were
here in the store we asked them for the names and addresses of any of
their relatives whom they thought worthy of inviting to our store. May
we at this time, etc., etc., etc. . . . No obligation, nothing to buy. Our
coffeepot is always hot, etc. . . . Sincerely,——."
The possibility of buying on the never-never—as the British so
quaintly call going into debt to buy—makes people into better
prospects. The selling task is eased. Less persuasion is required. An
official of the Institute for Motivational Research has explained that
people generally are afraid of making a purchasing decision of major
importance. The possibility of buying on credit, however, seems to
postpone the necessary decision. "It removes the air of finality inherent
in a cash transaction. In a sense the credit buyer makes up his mind to
buy while he is still paying for the item."
To the seller, another major appeal of selling on credit is that
customers tend to buy more when they discover they don't have to put
up the money immediately, and they are less apt to look hard at the
price tag or haggle for a lower price. It should not be overlooked,
furthermore, that many retailers were discovering to their pleasant
astonishment that they could often make more money on the interest
charges in financing a purchase than on the sale of the item itself.
For all these reasons the public began being assaulted with a
massive barrage of gay invitations to go into debt. The growing
dependence of the economy on credit buying became painfully evident
for example in 1959, when the nation was starting off on a new buying
binge, after the recession. The Wall Street Journal cited these three
among many comments from across the country. A department-store
credit manager in Fort Worth, commenting on his store's recent sales
gain, said, "Every dollar of the increase came from credit sales." A
banker in Elwood, Indiana, said his bank had experienced an
"astronomical" increase in consumer loans in the past two months. And
an executive of the J. C. Penney chain of variety stores commented that
never have people "been so conditioned to buy what interests them on
credit."
During the fifties, consumer indebtedness rose three times as fast as
personal income. The average American family by 1960 was taking on
about $750 of installment debt alone each year—and paying it off at the
rate of $650 a year. Millions of Americans were embracing never-never
buying with zest. The chairman of General Foods cited this new zest of
consumers to buy on credit in talking of the "creative" possibilities in
modern merchandising. He explained: "Today's consumer insists on
having whatever he or she wants at once, whether it be a house, an
automobile, an electric refrigerator, a power mower, a suit of clothes, an
Easter bonnet, or a vacation trip, and paying for it out of income yet to
be earned."
His emphasis was on the words "at once." The president of a bank
in Rutland, Vermont, commented less enthusiastically. "The young
people here are the same as everywhere else. They have to have a house
and a car right away." He added that in recent years the whole idea of
indebtedness had changed. Author William Attwood in surveying
American attitudes reported encountering a truck driver near San Diego
who lamented: "The more money I make, the more payments I seem to
take on. There's no letup." 1
Whatever the hazards to the consumer, a great many Americans
were finding that the fastest way to build a fortune was to deal not in
products but in money itself. Mildred Brady of Consumers Union
remarked to me that "the most profitable product sold today is money."
The truth of this could be observed by standing at the main intersection
of just about any American small or middle-sized city. The majority of
neon signs to be seen are likely to be pulsing or blinking messages such
as "LOANS" or "CREDIT." And the changing tenor of the invitations to
seek loans could be seen in New York's subway trains. They carried
posters showing "Mr. Consumer" as "king" being eagerly offered a
cigar by a moneylender of the Beneficial Finance System. The lender
gaily welcomes the "king" with the remark: "CASH? Just say the word.
Get your budget in good shape with
a Beneficial bill clean-up loan___We like to say Yes!" A good
many debt-ridden Americans were being attracted by the idea that
they could somehow "clean up" all their debts by taking on one new
master-type debt.
Once-lofty banks were joining in the scramble to ease the public
into indebtedness. They complained that the retailers who were happily
and profitably selling money were intruding on their territory. They
tried to outbid the other lenders with coaxing messages on billboards
and over the airways. Hundreds adopted the idea of issuing credit cards
that permit a person to go into any branch or into just about any store in
town, flash the card, and say, "Bill the bank." In Dallas, Texas, some of
the banks have been opening branches right on the floor of appliance
stores. And in some cases these bankers-on-the-spot have been rebating
to the store owner about a third of the interest charges they collect from
financing appliance sales.
Meanwhile, millions of Americans began stuffing their billfolds
with other kinds of credit cards that enabled them to buy baseball
tickets, perfume, old master paintings, men's suits, bedrooms, and
meals. Analysts at the Institute for Motivational Research had little
difficulty figuring the secret of the appeal of credit cards. They
explained: "Credit cards are symbols of status. They are also magic,
since they serve as money when one temporarily has no money. They
thus become symbols of power and inexhaustible potency."
And these magic symbols of potency were not hard to come by. The
Diners' Club regularly had men handing out application cards to
passers-by on both floors of Grand Central Station in New York.
In the early days of the Diners' Club, co-operating restaurants could
justify the extra 7 per cent service charge they had to pay the club on
the ground that it brought new business. But when in many cities most
of the major competing restaurants joined up with either the Diners' or
other dining credit clubs, membership then became a necessary expense
to keep from losing business. It didn't take the restaurants belonging to
credit clubs long to decide who should bear the burden of the 7 per cent
assessment. A great many passed the charge on to the customers in the
form of higher prices for food and drink.
Still, restaurateurs felt the credit cards were good for business.
Restaurant Management surveyed the credit-card situation and
concluded credit-card customers were much more likely to be big
spenders. In large restaurants "the average check that is charged through
a major credit-card company will be from 20 to 25 per cent higher" than
the check paid by the cash customer. It noted that some restaurant
owners were fearful that the increased prices on the menu might be
disastrous to the industry, but it counseled such timid operators to be of
good heart: "We sincerely doubt that the customer will even notice—
particularly the credit-card customer."
Several of the nation's larger variety-store chains began giving trial
runs to "charge-it" plates. Many department stores came up with
revolving credit schemes. And automobile credit rose 800 per cent
during the decade ending in 1957. When a motorcar merchant
advertised "100% financing plus easy terms," it usually meant a small
loan would be arranged on top of the maximum installment loan. The
profits to be made in financing motorcar purchases became so inviting
that many car dealers fought as hard to get the financing as they did to
clinch the sale of the car itself. A St. Louis dealer pointed out in
Automotive News that selling the financing and insurance could bring as
much as $146 extra profit on each sale.
In home buying, more and more millions of cash-short prospects
were being persuaded to take a second mortgage or to "buy" their home
on a "contract" basis. Under the common contract, the would-be
homeowner pays a very high interest—7 to 13 per cent a year—and
doesn't really take possession of the home until the contract is paid off.
He is allowed to live in it just as if he were renting it. In some parts of
Michigan, I found most of the new homes were being sold on
"contract."
Meanwhile, two novel types of mortgage were being pioneered to
lure the hard-pressed and the imprudent. One was the "open-end
mortgage," which becomes a sort of revolving charge account. As you
pay off some money, you can keep going back for more with little red
tape—and if you're not wary, you keep yourself deeply in debt for life.
The other tantalizing new deal in mortgaging was the "package
mortgage," which has become immensely popular with both sellers and
buyers. Under this "package," the mortgage covers not only the cost of
the home but also many of the extras, such as laundry and kitchen
equipment. Builders in St. Louis reported that the "package" helped
them double their sales. And a Fort Wayne, Indiana, builder told me
that a third of his home buyers were buying their appliances in the
"package." Appliances were included in the twenty-year mortgages.
Some were even buying intercom systems for their homes with speaker
attachments in the breezeway and ordering that the cost of them all go
into the "package." Builders found that offering the package mortgage
not only eased the financing but helped promote sales. Women were
more easily sold on a house if it already contained many sparkling
appliances.
And few computed the cost. Buying a refrigerator as a part of a
package mortgage with the cost of the refrigerator being paid over a
thirty-year period almost doubles the cost of a $400 refrigerator. Rug
manufacturers tried to get wall-to-wall rugs into homes under a package
mortgage. The Federal Housing Administration finally balked at this.
One reason for the balking was the obvious one that few rugs made
today can be expected to last the life of a thirty-year or even a fifteenyear mortgage.
Investigating home-buying habits in the Midwest, I found that most
home buyers do not compute the burden they are undertaking when a
home is offered to them on a long-term mortgage. In Toledo, Ohio, a
salesman and his wife proudly showed me their customized pre-fab
ranch house which they said they had just bought for $19,500. Did they
have a mortgage? Yes, it was a thirty-year kind for $17,000. How much
was their interest rate? The husband said, "Gosh, I don't know . . . 4½
per cent, I think." His wife thought it was 6 per cent. Their difference in
guesses could make a difference of nearly $6,000 in the total cost.
Actually, it turned out, they were paying 5½ per cent interest. The one
thing they did know was that their monthly payment was $96.53. We
quickly multiplied that figure by the 360 months they had committed
themselves to pay it, and added on the $2,500 cash down payment. The
result was a figure that plainly dismayed them: $37,250.80. That was
the real price of their home, not $19,500.
As the sixties began, the American practice of buying possessions
on the never-never began spreading on a large-scale basis to several
other parts of the world. Conservative British banks entered the
installment-lending business as goods became more plentiful in that
country. Joseph Wechsberg reported that in Yugoslavia na otplatu
(buying on installment) was becoming the new passion. He related:
"Everybody I know in Belgrade is falling hopelessly and
enthusiastically into debt. They can plunge to one third of their income
and the monthly payments are automatically deducted from their pay
check." 2 (This automatic deduction might ultimately have to become
the only feasible solution to the problem of collection in the United
States.)
Radio Moscow chided the Yugoslavs for becoming slaves to a
"degenerate capitalistic habit." But this just proved that sometimes the
propagandists in Moscow don't know what Soviet planners are up to.
Within a few weeks after Radio Moscow sneered at Yugoslavia, the
Soviet Union began offering her citizens products not in short supply
such as cameras and radios on an installment-plan basis.
How far Americans could continue running up debts against future
income without inviting disaster during an economic turndown was not
clear. The typical American family was several thousand dollars in debt,
counting both short-term and long-term commitments. On the other
hand, marketers claimed, Americans had a wider margin of income left
after the real necessities of life were provided than ever before—though
the definition of necessities was continually being upgraded by the
managers of the Labor Department's Cost-of-Living Index. Thus the
argument depended somewhat on whose definition of "necessity of life"
you were using.
The Federal Reserve System's Board of Governors observed that
"relatively little is known about the safety margins in the finances of
consumers who borrow on an . . . installment basis." It added that the
evidence suggested the margin of safety was getting narrower.
A survey by insurance companies revealed that the average
American family was about three months from bankruptcy. That was its
cushion against disaster after two decades of unparalleled prosperity.
For millions of families—especially for many living in suburban
subdivisions—the brink of disaster was much closer. They were so
pressed in meeting their host of monthly installment charges that they
were stopping smoking temporarily or putting their wives to work or
seeking debt-consolidation loans, or all three.
A number of members of the National Retail Merchants Association
began voicing apprehension about the mounting level of installment
debts. The controller of a Midwestern firm said he was now watching
collections more carefully than sales. And the controller of a Pittsfield,
Massachusetts, store said: "One really bad year in business and this
whole credit setup will fall like a card house."
In early 1960, bankers in many areas of America were reporting a
notable increase in requests for loans on motorcars that were not up to
their usual standards for risks. And the bankers were also uneasy
because the amount of money they had tied up in installment loans had
risen four times as fast as their deposits during the past decade.
By the spring of 1960, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York was
expressing concern that too many consumers were getting too deep into
debt. It noted that half of all American families were being forced to
devote a fifth of their income to meeting commitments on regular
payments and stated that this was a "very real reason for concern" and
that a continuing of the borrowing trend would "result in an unduly
heavy burden on the borrowers—particularly in the event of a more
serious recession than those experienced in recent years."
Other reports noted that the average American family was now
forced to set aside 18 per cent of its after-taxes income to pay its
consumer debt and monthly mortgage charges, whereas ten years ago
the figure was only 11 per cent. Meanwhile, the chief economist of a
leading advertising agency was predicting that in the coming decade the
proportion of family income going to pay installment debts would keep
rising.
If debt collection does become a plaguing problem, American
creditors might consider the idea of using conspicuously painted debtcollection trucks to call on the homes of the delinquents. The dread of
neighborhood gossip would inspire debtors to exert themselves more to
make repayment. Such trucks were under consideration by a merchants'
association in Great Britain.
Whatever their ability to repay, American consumers were spending
an ever-larger share of their income in meeting interest charges. The
bewitching new credit-card plans of banks were usually costing the
users 12 to 18 per cent interest. In addition, the banks were often
collecting 5 or 6 per cent from the stores for providing the business.
And the stores in many cases were raising their prices to the customers
in order to cover this expense.
Banks with such plans were often disguising their stiff interest
charges by advertising that their loans cost 1 per cent or 1½ per cent a
month. Any interest charge not translated into true annual cost is
meaningless. Yet many stores were specifically forbidding their sales
personnel to talk about true annual interest. Many short-term loans were
offered the public as 3 per cent. The fine type disclosed that they were 3
per cent a month, so that they were actually 36 per cent loans. In 1960,
Senator Paul Douglas began pressing a bill (S.27S5) that would require
moneylenders of all kinds to disclose in writing to consumers exactly
how much interest the borrower would have to pay on a true annual
basis. Sales Management pointed out that the bill might send "buyerson-the-cuff into a tailspin." And an executive of a national merchants'
association argued that people expect to pay more when they buy on
credit, but that "to give them too much information about financing
costs would only befuddle them."
As millions of American citizens began adjusting to spending more
than they earned, living in the red was glorified as not only fun but
patriotic. Sales Credit News printed a parable about the wise and foolish
lovers. The foolish lovers—in its version—decided they still couldn't
afford to get married, so they both set out on a systematic program of
saving until they could unite and establish a home without going into
debt. They were foolish, the journal explained, because they were
postponing and thus missing a portion of the pleasure of living life
together. And, further, they ''deprived the national economy of two or
more years of family consumption."
The wise lovers, in contrast, were not deterred from uniting in
matrimony merely because they had no savings. They got married
immediately, took their honeymoon on credit, bought a car on credit,
bought a home on credit, and furnished it on credit. These heroes of the
consuming battle line, the journal said, "stimulated production, created
employment, increased purchasing power, raised the standard of living."
The journal didn't say whether they lived happily ever after.
Chances are, they didn't. Living close to insolvency with unpaid bills
pressing creates marital strains between husbands and wives. This, of
course, is a matter of common observation, but it has also been
substantiated by a survey made for a group of insurance companies.
When investigators for U.S. News & World Report sought to
diagnose the mood of America by nationwide interviewing, they asked
many people what their biggest worry was. The answers predominantly
were "money" or "making ends meet." The report stated: "It's a worry
that cuts across all income groups, all occupations, and all ages."
A minister in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, reported that "in 75 per cent of
the cases where people come to me with marital problems, money
enters in." And a doctor in the same city said many of his patients' aches
and pains were caused by money problems.
"You buy a car on time and stretch the payments over thirty months,
and you've got a chronic pain. You really have."
A Long Island kidnaper explained his rash act by stating he had
lately been harassed as a result of trying to meet installment payments
for thousands of dollars' worth of gadgets and accessories he had bought
for his little home.
Still, as the sixties have begun with something less than jet-powered
take-off, most American citizens are not particularly apprehensive that
they would fall into really serious trouble because of their debts. They
feel that the federal government—whether Democratic or Republican—
is emotionally committed to make it safe for them to continue spending.
And it has become increasingly probable that if a notable lag in
consumption does develop the federal government will be under
massive pressure to manipulate interest rates in such a way that saving
will be discouraged and spending encouraged.
When worried economists urged the curbing of easy credit,
merchants and manufacturers protested that it would slow down sales
and invite a depression. They quite probably were recalling the
admonitions from Washington to buy instead of save during the
recession of 1958. One business analyst reported then that "evidence is
mounting that people are saving instead of spending, and the
Administration doesn't like it." The headline over his analysis read in
part: "RISE IN THRIFT SPOTTED AS DISTURBING ADMINISTRATION."
William Whyte, Jr., in The Organization Man, cited an
unforgettable comment he frequently encountered in the new suburbias
when the people talked about the possibility of a depression. He found
that they refused to believe it could happen because "They can't
dispossess everybody."
Meanwhile, at least one marketing consultant was speculating that
the great forthcoming crop of new babies—so eagerly awaited by
marketers (see Chapter 16)—might well be financed on credit.
CHAPTER 15
Hedonism for the Masses
"WHY DENY YOURSELF?"—Headline of an advertisement for
John David men's wear.
IN THE BROADWAY PLAY, "A RAISIN IN THE SUN," THE SON IMBUED
with modern ideas voiced a lament that would delight most marketers.
He cried:
"I want so many things, it drives me crazy. . . . Money is life!"
His old-fashioned mother, sad and perplexed, replied: "You can't be
satisfied just to be proud. . . . How different we've become!"
The marketers of the United States, in addition to developing
specific strategies for moving goods, sought to develop an overall
strategy that would make all the others more effective. They sought to
generate a love for possessions and a zest for finding momentary
pleasures. They sought to encourage Americans to break out of their
old-fashioned inhibitions and to learn to live it up. All this, it was
hoped, would produce a permissive mood for carefree buying.
Americans traditionally have liked to think of themselves as a
frugal, hard-working, God-fearing people making sacrifices for the long
haul. They have exalted such maxims of Ben Franklin as: "A man may,
if he knows not how to save as he gets, keep his nose to the grindstone."
Puritanical traits were esteemed necessary to survival by the settlers
struggling to convert forest and prairie into a national homeland. By the
nineteenth century, however, a flamboyant streak was beginning to
emerge clearly in the American character. Emerson observed that
Americans, unlike Europeans, exhibited "an uncalculated, headlong
expenditure." As more and more Americans found themselves living in
metropolitan areas, hedonism as a guiding philosophy of life gained
more and more disciples. People sought possessions more than formerly
in emulation of, or competition with, their neighbors. Quite possibly,
the environment of thickly settled areas brought a lessening of serenity
and a feeling of being swallowed up that impelled the people to strive
for distinctive emblems and gratification through consumption. The
growing availability of manufactured goods undoubtedly had a great
deal to do with the rise in hedonism. The upheaval of wars and the
uncertainty of life in an atomic era also contributed to the live-for-themoment spirit.
During the fifties, however, another force came powerfully into play
in the promotion of hedonism. Many marketers, as a calculated strategy,
sought to promote a mood of self-indulgence in order to promote sales.
The puritanical inhibitions of Americans were seen as blocking
consumers from enjoying the wondrously rich, full new way of life that
marketers were ready and eager to provide.
Advertising agencies in their house organs declared that the
puritanism still lurking in many Americans should be a major target.
Admen were exhorted to re-educate people's thinking into "healthier
channels." Ernest Dichter, head of the Institute for Motivational
Research, was in the forefront of marketing consultants who spelled out
for sales managers the opportunities provided by the new mood of selfindulgence. He reported to them that "America is experiencing a
revolution in self-indulgence." People, he said, were more and more
prone to ask, "Why shouldn't I?" They were increasingly willing "to
give vent" to their "whims and desires." And he added: "We've learned
that one rarely makes one's ultimate goal—so why not enjoy life now?"
At other times he seemed a little less certain this mood had become
general and pointed out why it should prevail and how it could be made
to prevail. Americans had been "caught in a cobweb of tradition and
moral concepts which . . . have portrayed life as a sequence of misery,
worry, and toil." What was needed, he said, was a more reasonable
attitude toward life, with fun and pleasure and happiness no longer
considered unethical. "Learning to accept the permanent 'burden' of a
good life is one of the most challenging psychological problems of our
age." His publication Motivations said that one of the central problems
of the day was to give people permission to enjoy their prosperity, to
feel moral not immoral in their hedonism. Advertising displays and
sales promotion plans should be geared to this theme.
Many marketers joined in the game of tearing away the puritanical
cobwebs and educating the public away from being old-fud Prudence
Pennies. Professor Otis Pease, Stanford University historian, took a
comprehensive look at advertising in the late fifties and concluded that
advertising was seeking to discredit thrift and was working to whet the
acquisitive impulse.
Here is one kind of problem they tackled. Furniture makers were
annoyed by the persistent old-fashioned habits many parents exhibited
when their children married. These parents still thought they were
helping the newlyweds by giving them hand-me-downs, pieces of
furniture they could spare from their own homes. Some furniture men
began urging at trade-association meetings that the furniture industry
sponsor an advertising campaign designed to shame both parents and
the young couples away from such a practice.
The joys of self-indulgence were stressed, consciously or
unwittingly, in many sales messages. A New York department store told
women in a full-page advertisement: "Even If You Own a Dozen Coats,
You Can't Afford to Miss. . . . " A San Francisco store featuring
luxurious fixtures and accessories for bathrooms beckoned passers-by
with the sign, "PAMPER YOURSELF!"
Sales experts began searching for occasions to provide the public
with an excuse for splurging. Holidays took on ever greater importance
in their planning. A bed merchandiser cried out that he was offering
"BIGGEST WASHINGTON'S BIRTHDAY SALE IN OUR HISTORY—ONE
DAY ONLY!" A New York department store ran a full-page
advertisement showing children's shoes with the headline: "EASTER IS A
NEW PAIR OF SHOES." An appliance store in Erie, Pennsylvania, sold
$30,000 worth of goods in a giant three-day St. Patrick's Day sale with
prizes. On the second day of the sale, members of a local church held a
cake sale in the store. Many who came for cake also bought appliances.
By the beginning of the sixties, Mother's Day was computed to
produce $17 worth of purchases for every mother in the land. Father's
Day produced $7 worth of buying per father. And Graduation Day
assured $10 worth of purchasing per graduate.
The most cherished splurge day, of course, was Christmas because
that was not just a day but a whole season. Spending per family ran into
hundreds of dollars. An average teen-age girl could be counted upon to
make at least $55 worth of purchases in anticipation of Christmas each
year. The main streets of some Midwestern cities were draped with
Christmas decorations by the second week in November. Several weeks
before a recent Christmas, the Arthur Murray organization in New York
proclaimed:
"Hurry: Special pre-Holiday Arthur Murray Offer!
GIVE YOURSELF THIS CHRISTMAS GIFT . . . Now!"
The Christmas gift ahead-of-time that the reader was invited to give
himself—in this notable interpretation of the traditional Christmas
spirit—was a dancing lesson.
Two advertisements within a few feet of each other in a New York
subway car indicated pretty well what was happening to Christmas
under the pressures of consumerism. One showed Santa Claus holding
on his lap a cutie wearing du Pont nylon stockings. The other showed a
different Santa happily smoking Kent cigarettes. On television, on the
other hand, a third Santa was expressing his preference for El Producto
cigars. To a child it must have all been very confusing.
An appliance retailer confided to Consumer Reports: "If you have to
hit a guy [customer] with higher prices, do it during the Christmas
selling season when he feels good." Merchants were doing such a good
job of promoting the giveaway spirit around Christmastime that
attorneys for defendants in claims cases maneuvered to try to keep their
cases from coming before a jury in the latter half of December.
As sales planners searched the calendar for possible splurge days,
they found that the calendar revealed poor planning. There were no
really good holiday excuses for splurging between Father's Day in June
and the Christmas season. A movement began to set aside August 1 as
"Friendship Day." On this new holiday each citizen could show—
through purchasing gifts—how much he cherished his really good
friends.
We shouldn't overlook Valentine's Day. It has become one of the
big newcomers in the eyes of marketers. It is in fourth place among the
holidays producing significant increases in sales. A New York
department store filled its many windows with merchandise, and over
each it placed the sign: "HOW DO I LOVE THEE? LET ME COUNT THE
WAYS." The ways, as enumerated in the window displays, included
mink stoles, copper frying pans, ties, and negligees. As Valentine Day,
1960, approached, the publication Sales Sense for druggists called
Valentine's Day "a real sweetheart of a day to increase sales" for those
stores "alert to cash sentimentality into dollars."
Sad days as well as glad days could be the occasion for giving.
Billboards in some parts of the United States showed a bouquet of
flowers with the admonition not just to send sympathy.
Another approach used in promoting hedonism in the United States
was to encourage, to a state of chronic itch, the tendency of Americans
to love change in their lives. Anything "old," "used," or "permanent,"
was to be disdained. A marketing expert counseled the home-furnishing
industry: "Make people discover for themselves that there's fun and
pleasure in changing their decor. Establish a standard based on
changeability and not on permanence." All this helped provide a
philosophical base for the throwaway spirit, already discussed.
Home builders succeeded during the fifties in insinuating a new and
odious word into the language of home merchandising. That word was
"used." A new house became a "used" house if the buyer decided a
month after moving in that he wanted to sell it. Any used house was to
be viewed with suspicion if not contempt. It was soiled merchandise.
(Your author should confess that in his entire lifetime he has never lived
in anything but very used houses.)
The executive marketing board of the National Association of
Home Builders was admonished by the president of an advertising
agency in late 1959 to set up a multimillion-dollar advertising fund to
make Americans want to get rid of old homes. He proposed that the
association make the average American as dissatisfied with an
antiquated house as he would be with a twenty-year-old automobile.
John and Mary Drone, the chronically overstrained subdivision
dwellers in John Keats's The Crack in the Picture Window, were caught
up in the organized scorn of the used house. Keats related: "The Drones
never once considered anything but the purchase of a new house. Not
for an instant did either entertain the notion of a spacious—and far
cheaper—older house. . . . Newness became a criterion surpassing cost
and, in some cases, need. Second-hand development houses were sold
to the kind of people who buy second-hand automobiles solely out of
need."
Pierre Martineau, research and marketing director of The Chicago
Tribune, observed much the same wariness of the old in his Motivation
in Advertising. He reported: "Tradition bores us now. Instead of being
an asset, it is virtually a liability to a people looking for the newest—the
newest!—always the newest!" A survey made by a magazine for the
mechanically inclined revealed that the typical American changed his or
her car mainly for the sake of change. He wants a new one. General
Motors in 1960 began running double-spread advertisements glorifying
the general idea of new-car buying. It proclaimed. "THERE'S NOTHING
LIKE A NEW CAR TO ENRICH YOUR FAMILY LIFE."
Hedonism was also actively promoted by campaigns to persuade the
American people that they deserved to enjoy the pleasures of enriched
living instantly and without lifting a finger. "Instant" and "ready"
became the magic words in marketing everything from soda pop,
whipped cream, and cherry pies, to headache remedies. The noted
business philosopher, Charles G. Mortimer, chairman of the board of
General Foods, lectured businessmen that one of the great challenges of
the day was promoting "creative convenience." He pointed to the "tidal
wave of craving for convenience" sweeping the country and stated:
"Today, convenience is the success factor of just about every type of
product and service that is showing steady growth." He continued, "Just
about everything we buy today must be ready to use, ready to wear,
ready to plug in, ready to turn on, ready to take home . . . ready to serve.
This aspect of our national impatience represents probably the greatest
challenge to marketing creativeness that American businessmen have
ever faced." Tomorrow, he predicted, even the home would be prepackaged and sold "almost ready for a family to move in and start
living!"
According to one joke, maids considering the possibility of favoring
a family with their services were likely to inquire cautiously: "Do you
peel or thaw?"
An elderly supermarket operator in Indianapolis shook his head
sadly as he pointed out to me all the "convenience" foods he was selling
to bridge-playing wives. He muttered: "The husband works all day and
then comes home to a dinky little precooked pot pie." He said he would
not permit them in his own home. Ready-to-serve meals are likely to
cost up to 50 per cent more than home-prepared meals.
He told of jesting with one young redheaded wife who was
inspecting his bakery-made cherry pies. He asked her why she didn't
make one herself. She replied: "I wouldn't know how to begin." This
elderly man began showing her by listing the ingredients. When he said
"shortening," she asked, "What's that?" He explained and began
showing her how to roll out the crust. She wrinkled her pert nose and
said, "It sounds terribly messy. I think I'll take this one here." Hundreds
of wives, he told me with a shrug, buy his expensive jars of chicken a la
king every week when they could make it themselves from leftovers for
less than a third the cost. Yet these same wives, he said, see themselves
as frugal, thrifty guardians of the family's dollars and keep complaining
to their husbands about the terrible time they have making ends meet
because of the high cost of food.
Recently businessmen have discovered that the United States is
embarking on a "new age of elegance." Women's clothing is becoming
"casually elegant." Merchandisers of furniture have become obsessed,
in their talk, about the public's new craving for elegance. Gold-plated
bathroom faucets are soaring in popularity, as are gold-plated
toothbrushes. Jewelers have joined in hailing the new era of elegance.
And the food marketers have decided that the United States is becoming
a nation of elegance-loving epicureans. The sale of luxury foods
doubled in four years as North Americans were persuaded to nibble
$3,000,000 worth of caviar a year, and the more brave of them to
stomach such delicacies as chocolate-covered ants.
A domestic champagne producer, in its advertisements, has begun
urging married couples to break out champagne for breakfast. It calls
breakfast the "critical time in matrimony." And it proposes that the
spouses "face up" to each other with champagne whenever they begin
feeling that "the bloom is off the marriage."
Still another aspect of the promotion of hedonism, we should note,
has been the drive to make Americans more impulsive in their shopping
habits. Du Pont found that impulse buying in supermarkets had soared
nearly a third in a decade. Supermarkets changed from being simple,
stripped-down marts designed to pass on the economies of mass buying
to the consumer. Originally they had operated on a slim 12 per cent
markup. Now the supermarkets have become shimmering carnivals
offering free automobiles as prizes, offering premiums, trading stamps,
soft music, and hundreds of packages that have been shrewdly designed,
at considerable expense, to present an imagery that will cry out to the
passing shopper: "Grab me!" The result of all these changes in the
supermarkets is that markups have risen on the average to nearly 20 per
cent.
The family's apparel items also have become impulse items. Modern
Packaging reported that shirt manufacturers felt it was no longer
sufficient to wrap a shirt in a transparent, protective film. The package
had to be upgraded by creating more invitingly printed transparent
packages.
Louis Cheskin, director of the Color Research Institute, meanwhile
reported to marketers: "The consumer does not judge the product, he
judges the package." Men's belts might be a case in point. Traditionally,
belts offered for sale simply were hung from a store rack and presented
as a utilitarian item. However, marketers were finding that men's belts
could be sold to both men and their wives as impulse items if adroitly
packaged. Mr. Cheskin pointed to the experience of the makers of Paris
belts. Mr. Cheskin was invited to address a conference of the top
management of the Paris company on the subject, "Why Should Belts
Be Packaged?" He summed up his advice to them in his book, Why
People Buy. He said that for the wife in this era of abundance "the mere
act of buying a belt for [her] husband . . . is filled with deep
psychological implications." Here is the surprising analysis of these
implications as they were turned up by his researchers:
"Marketing tests and experience have shown that normally a woman
will not be attracted by belts hanging from a rack. Hanging belts do not
arouse a woman's interest. A hanging belt has no attraction power. It is
limp, unstimulating, and undesirable. To the normal, healthy, energetic
woman a hanging belt is not a symbol of virility or quality. It cannot
possibly be associated with her man. It is not an appropriate symbol. It
presents a negative image."
On the other hand, "a belt that is encased in a psychologically potent
package" has favorable symbolism and "is naturally assigned the role of
symbolizing respect, affection, and even great love."
The potent vessel chosen to house this love symbol was a chaste
white cardboard container with a transparent plastic dome appropriately
called "Vista-dome," perhaps because it resembled a vista-dome bus.
The success of all these strategies for promoting hedonism was
apparent from a number of reports. Printers' Ink reported that a new
type of feminine customer in supermarkets was evolving. This
customer, it reported, "is constantly looking for something new."
An editor in Pittsburgh observed: "The people who are complaining
about high prices are the ones coming out of supermarkets loaded with
bottles of cocktail cherries, goldfish in plastic bags, frozen foods, TV
dinners, phonograph records—all sorts of things you really don't have to
have so fancy." Sociologists reported finding that American families,
regardless of their income level, tended to wish they had about 25 per
cent more than they had.
As the sixties opened, the business and financial editor of The New
York Herald Tribune summed up for businessmen what prevailed by
saying: "If a whole people can be said to wallow in prosperity,
Americans will do it in 1960 as, uninhibited, they gluttonously reap the
fruits of 183 years of free enterprise." He said that the Luxury Life had
become the goal of most Americans.
Perhaps the most impressive report on the swing to hedonism was
made by the research division of The Chicago Tribune. Its study,
entitled The New Consumer, was based on a $100,000 study of
homemakers from three different social layers in the suburbs of
Chicago. At all three levels a trend toward hedonism was evident. Mr.
Martineau, director of research and marketing for the Tribune, summed
up the findings of the investigators as they related to this trend in these
words:
"There has been a shift from the philosophy of security and saving
to a philosophy of spending and immediate satisfaction . . . more selfindulgent spending, a tendency to equate standard of living with
possession of material goods. . . . "
Consider the change in attitude toward spending money. At the
upper-middle-class level, a wife in the town of Golf recalled the simple,
frugal pattern of life that her own parents had maintained and then
exclaimed: "We're so different. We are absolute spendthrifts. We don't
have a dime. We live for today. . . ." Another wife in this same town
asserted: "You must spend just a little more than you can afford to
progress higher in life." The reports noted that the wives at this level
tended to see "conspicuous consumption" as investment, not waste. One
wife in Golf, the daughter of a prosperous, self-made lumberman, said:
"My father feels it is disgraceful the way we spend money—he feels we
should save for a rainy day; but I feel I may not live for the rainy day,
so I'm going to enjoy each day to the full now. . . . My parents did not
decorate their home every four or five years, as we do."
At the somewhat less prosperous suburb of Park Forest, wives
showed the same restlessness and pleasure in spending. One wife said
that the difference between herself and her parents was that she buys
"new furniture and lamps because we get tired of looking at them any
longer." Another woman said: "Today, we're always looking to buy
something that's a time saver so that we can have more time to relax and
enjoy life." Still another woman said that when she and her husband buy
draperies, rugs, and furniture they hope the goods "don't last as long as
our parents' did."
Women in the third community of Home Town, primarily a
working-class and lower-white-collar suburb, revealed this same
fascination with accumulating material things. The report stated that in
Home Town "the gadget . . . becomes the symbol of 'finer living.' "
CHAPTER 16
Progress Through
Proliferation of People
"A BONANZA FOR INDUSTRY-BABIES. Sixty Million More U.S.
Consumers in Next Nineteen Years."—U.S. NEWS & WORLD
REPORT, January 4, 1957.
IN THE LOBBY OF THE UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF COMMERCE
building a giant "clock" is running which brings joy to the American
marketers who watch it ticking. It is one Washington frill they heartily
endorse. Every seven and a half seconds a blue light flashes, as on a
pinball machine, to indicate that a new baby has been born somewhere
in the United States. Much more slowly, a purple light flashes—every
twenty seconds—to indicate that some unfortunate American citizen has
died. Another flashing light indicates the occasional arrival of an
immigrant.
The key light is the white one, which shows the net results of all
these changes. It flashes every eleven seconds to indicate that in that
period one more human being has been added to the total United States
population. Thus every eleven seconds marketers have gained one new
prospect who will need food, clothing, shelter, and later on toy pistols,
motorcars, hi-fi sets, powerboats, mixers, and casket. A large sign
beside this clock during the late fifties read:
MORE PEOPLE
mean
MORE MARKETS
A soft-drink party was held in the lobby in October, 1958, when the
tote meter flashed past 175,000,000. Heady predictions were made
about the prospects opening up to marketers as a result of the fantastic
population explosion in the United States.
U.S. News & World Report, which is read primarily by
businessmen, stated: "America's greatest boom is in people. Business,
workers, government will be kept busy providing for an exploding
population."
Actually, the United States population was exploding much more
violently than that publication realized when it forecast in 1957 that the
nation would have "Sixty Million More U.S. Consumers in 19 years."
Later census estimates indicated that nearly one hundred million more
consumers might be added to the United States population in the next
twenty years. People were living longer and longer. Couples were
marrying younger and younger—and setting their sights on larger
families. Girls now approaching the marriageable age expected to have
one more child than their mothers did. The bumper crop of babies born
after World War II would soon be marrying—in the mid-sixties—and
were expected to produce a prodigious increase in the population.
The nation's growing population was widely perceived by exultant
businessmen as a built-in guarantee of long-term prosperity and as a
main prop of the expanding economy. And to some extent they sought
to promote the idea that having big families was a fine, wonderful thing.
Americans were prone to deplore population expansion in faraway
lands. The fact was, however, that the United States was going through
one of the greatest population explosions in the history of mankind. Its
rate of population increase was as high as that of India and Italy, if not
higher. Nearly three million people already were being added to the
United States population each year, and that rate would grow. This was
equivalent to adding annually a dozen brand-new cities the size of
Omaha. If current trends continued, quite likely the United States
population by the end of the century—or within the lifetime of most of
us—would more than double the present population.
All this was viewed as progress. Babies by the millions would
eliminate the possibility of serious depressions and serve as a backstop
against possible miscalculation in overexpanding the capacity of
factories. A few weeks after the stock market went into a slump at the
beginning of 1960, financial analysts advised nervous investors to be of
good cheer: with the population growth in prospect, stocks just had to
go up in the long run.
The Advertising Council took the lead, appropriately, in spelling out
the happy implications of the baby boom. To put consumers in a mood
to step up their spending—and stop worrying—it organized a
multimillion-dollar pepping-up campaign. One of the advertisements it
prepared showed the picture of a stork—symbolizing population
growth—on its nest. The caption read: "THIS BIRD MEANS BUSINESS."
Such ads not only would help put the public in a confident buying
mood but might encourage American families to feel they were being
patriotic if they had large families, as well as proving their virility and
old-fashioned Americanism. During the 1958 recession, the Advertising
Council drew up seven basic reasons why Americans should be
confident about their future. The Number One reason cited was "more
people."
Here are a few other samples of the kind of exulting businessmen
were doing at the prospect of multiplying the number of humans in the
United States.
Printers' Ink: "Marketing opportunities are unlimited. . . . It will
mean that in the next ten years the rate of new home production will
have to be doubled."
Sales Management quoted a marketing-research director as
exclaiming, when the United States Census Bureau revised upward its
projection of future population growth: "There is gold in them thar
years."
Engineering News Record: "NEW POPULATION SCORE CARD CAN
HELP YOU STRIKE IT RICH—The country's booming population growth
spells money in the bank for the alert construction man. . . . It means
More homebuilding
More community facilities
More roads
More commercial buildings
More factories
More transportation facilities."
The views of marketers that more babies could be the basis for
national rejoicing became widely accepted or seconded by the public.
The number of young families hoping to have four or more children
doubled during the postwar period.
To marketers the vast emerging "youth market" was particularly
tantalizing and challenging. For one thing, there were so many
prospective customers involved. A vice-president of an advertising
agency, McCann-Erickson, pointed out that by 1965 there would be
77,000,000 young people in the United States under the age of twenty.
As a businessman and I drove past a new schoolyard filled with
children, he joked: "Look at all those happy little dollar signs."
Furthermore, these young people were becoming significant
spenders. Most estimates agreed that teen-agers alone had become a
ten-billion-dollar market just on the basis of their own spending power.
And by 1970 they would be a twenty-billion-dollar market. Already
each teen-ager could be counted on to spend more than $400 a year. It
was no longer a market to be scorned as a nickel-and-dime thing.
Marketers were admonished to remember that all these millions of
youngsters would one day marry and become really big spenders if
properly nurtured. Catch them while their buying habits are forming!
"GET THEM AT THE GET AGE!" one network trumpeted as it urged
advertising men to consider its heavy juvenile audience in buying time.
And Seventeen magazine stressed that its teen-age readers were at the
"motivage" in acquiring lifetime buying habits.
A firm called Teenage Public Relations, Inc., emerged to guide
advertisers in tapping the teen-age market. And Teen magazine set up a
Teen Consumer Testing Board to help advertisers make sure they were
playing the right "tune" to lure teen-agers to their products.
Finally, the youth market was receiving new respect because
marketers were realizing that youths are perhaps the most tempting
target of all for selling because they tend to be even more impulsive,
unskilled, and manipulatable than their parents. And parents are more
prone than in the past to indulge their youngsters in whatever fads the
marketers are able to stimulate. Teen-agers proved to be excellent
prospects for deodorants, breast-developer hormones, hair dyes, home
permanents, pimple removers, and pep pills. An executive of the
Institute for Motivational Research pointed out that while teenagers
might not believe in authority, they did believe in advertising.
The new mood of parents in wishing to indulge their children's
whims was noted several times by researchers for the Chicago Tribune's
study of attitudes of suburban homemakers. One mother in Park Forest
explained: "My teen-age son likes to wear off-color sweaters and shirts
with socks to match. Elastic belts are the fad now. My daughter must
have a leather parka jacket. We want our children to enjoy life.
Therefore, if they want something the other children have, we buy it for
them."
The Tribune's report on Park Forest observed: "There is much
buying for the children, and the things bought are determined by what
the child wants, rather than what the parents want for him. What the
child wants, in turn, is determined either by what the other kids have or
by a particular item seen in advertisements. The parents see 'giving the
child what he wants' in the way of material things as a positive thing."
The great baby boom—or "population bomb," as some preferred to
call it—put marketers in many dozens of lines to mapping plans to
"cash in" on it.
First, of course, there was the obvious tot and toddler market for
baby powder, nursery furniture, soft foods, nipples, etc. Sales
Management reported in 1960 that new baby foods were being
researched and launched at "a frantic pace."
Then there was the booming youngster market for ice cream, soda
pop, phonograph records, and toys—not to mention school desks,
rubbers, etc. American youngsters by 1960 were receiving a billion and
a half dollars' worth of toys each year. During a good December day,
American stores were jingling up six million dollars' worth of toy sales
every hour. The average American child received $26 worth of toys a
year. In my own state of Connecticut, where toy consumption is highest,
the average child received $36 worth. The head of a firearms
manufacturing firm observed that by the time a boy is fifteen he has had
between fifteen and twenty replicas of guns—and so is now a prime
prospect for a real bullet-firing one.
Most of the major manufacturers of brassieres—and many minor
ones—began promoting and selling bras to nine- and ten-year-old girls.
By 1960, this had become an important market, as thousands of little
girls had been conditioned by the emphasis on bosoms in advertising
and elsewhere to worry about their flattish chests or to see bras as status
symbols. The 28AA bra especially built for moppets was described by
New York women's editor Eugenia Sheppard as "a limp white object
that looks like a dead rabbit and is positively the No. 1 gift, except for
nylons, that ten-year-olds . . . crave these days." She quoted a bra
executive as explaining, "Of course, it's all in their minds, since most of
these bras have hardly any shape. . . . A few are padded for little girls
with an inferiority complex about being flat."
The really lush youth market, however, was the teen-age group. Its
members were likely to have big wants, big allowances; and often they
had their own earned, big-sized spending money. Life magazine
surveyed the teen-agers' spending habits and concluded that they were
surrounding themselves with "a fantastic array of garish and often
expensive baubles and amusements," including 1,500,000 motorcars
and $20,000,000 worth of lipstick. It cited the case of a seventeen-yearold girl in Van Nuys, California, as a "seller's dream." The consumption
habits of this girl, Suzie, while high, were said to be fairly typical of
girls in "upper-middle-income families in her town." In the previous
year, Suzie had received $1,500 worth of clothes and $550 worth of
entertainment and $102 worth of beauty-parlor treatments. She owned
seven bathing suits and had her own telephone. On summer-vacation
days she loved to wander with her mother through department stores,
picking out frocks or furnishings for her room or silver and expensive
crockery for the hope chest she had already started. The publication said
some people might think that American teen-agers were being spoiled
to death, but it suggested that it was too late for parents to revolt. "Teenage spending," it said, had become so important that "such action would
send quivers through the entire economy."
In its predictions of things to come as the sixties began, Printers' Ink
carried the headline: "AD AGENCIES WILL SET UP TEEN-AGE
SECTIONS." The publisher pointed out that teenagers constituted the
fastest-growing market in the United States today, "offering astounding
sales potential." But, he added, "special advertising techniques must be
developed to meet the challenge."
One group of marketers making great gains with teen-agers was the
cigarette makers. Fortune magazine, commenting on the way the
cigarette industry had managed to bounce back from its slump
following the cancer scare as it related to cigarette smoking, observed:
"In part this [bounce back] is due to population gains, particularly in the
big increase in the number of teen-agers, who appear to be smoking
more furiously than ever before."
Coffee makers meanwhile were working to recruit teen-agers. The
National Coffee Association placed a sixteen-page insert in Scholastic
magazine, which is geared to teen-agers. It gave tips on such
commendable things as studying, safe driving, grooming, dating, health,
and popularity, but printed a coffee recipe at the bottom of every page.
Perhaps the most significant—and, to me as the parent of three teenagers, most disquieting—move the marketers made to tap the teen-age
market was to issue "junior" credit cards. Many department and other
stores across the land have begun inviting Junior to wave his credit card
and say, "Charge it!" Stores of one major chain began taking young
debtors on the cuff even before they were old enough to shave—at the
age of fourteen. Some stores made it clear that parental approval was
not necessary in order to open a junior charge account. A department
store in Iowa began advertising: "TEEN-AGERS! HAVE YOUR OWN
CHARGE ACCOUNT!"
An official of the National Retail Merchants Association exhorted
department stores to open up junior charge accounts and contended:
"Teen-agers of today are America's greatest natural resources" and offer
a "made-to-order opportunity for the sales-minded credit executive."
The stores inviting Junior's patronage on a credit basis usually
professed to be utterly uninterested in him as a customer. They just
wanted to help him become a more prudent citizen by offering him an
educational program in money management. A department store in
Iowa heralded its junior credit plan by saying, "Its purpose is to give
these young people experience in managing their budgets and to
promote their early appreciation of good credit standing in their
community." On the other hand, the Council on Consumer Information
commented on some of the plans that stores were making for Junior by
asking: "Are they attempting to follow the Biblical admonition: 'Train
up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old he will not
depart from it'?" The president of New York's Bowery Savings Bank
said that teaching the young to spend on credit "is something like
teaching the young to use narcotics."
This training of the young was also being pressed by one
association of finance companies with the rather amazing cooperation
of a national association of school officials. A booklet entitled Using
Consumer Credit, widely distributed in American schools, upon
inspection turned out to have been prepared with the help of two
publicists working on behalf of this association of finance companies. It
urged its student readers: "Don't be afraid to use credit."
A further development pleasing to marketers was that young people
were marrying at an earlier age. The most frequent marriage age of girls
had dropped to eighteen. And more and more college students were
marrying instead of waiting until after graduation. This meant they
usually were permitting their early years of marriage to be subsidized
by parents. A young man no longer needed to establish his capability to
be a breadwinner before marrying.
When a lad and lass prepare to marry, something pretty wonderful
happens from the marketers' viewpoint. Spending—by cash or credit—
shoots up at a dazzling rate. The bride and groom spend, their parents
spend, and their well-wishers spend. The couple of 1960 needs a
shimmering brand-new home instantly, fully equipped. U.S. News &
World Report put "new demand resulting from a marriage at about
$13,600." And it stressed that that figure was conservative. It broke
down this figure as follows: A house costing an average of $10,000 was
required—whether purchased or rented. Then there was at least $500
required for a car, and an average of $2,500 for equipping the new
household with furniture and electric appliances. Finally—and this
seems most conservative—there was $600 required for expenses
incidental to the wedding such as ring, clothes, catering, and
honeymoon. An enterprising sample-distribution outfit, Bridal-Pax,
began handing out kits at marriage-license bureaus. These kits,
distributed to hundreds of thousands of brides-to-be, contained samples
of brand-name furniture polish, household cleaner, etc.—and, of all
things, headache pills!
And so it was that most marketers were elated by the prospects of
an additional hundred million consumers being added to the United
States population within about two decades. Some alarmists wondered
where jobs, resources, and living space would be found to support these
additional hundred million people. These, indeed, were prickly
problems to be pondered tomorrow. To talk about them today might jar
consumer confidence. But could such questions wait?
PART III
Implications
CHAPTER 17
Ever-Mounting Consumption?
" . . . we may not be able to get rid of the mess without also getting
rid of the abundance"—JOHN KOUWENHOVEN in a Harper's article
entitled "Waste Not, Have Not—A Clue to American Prosperity."
THUS FAR IN OUR EXPLORATION WE HAVE NOTED THE DEVELOPING
dilemma posed by ever-mounting productivity in the United States, and
the very logical or human responses that marketing people have made in
coping with this new kind of national dilemma. We have examined the
strategies devised to encourage individual Americans to buy more
goods and services each year. And we have noted the growing reliance
of marketers on the willingness of Americans to keep their population
expanding.
The results might be characterized in various ways. But certainly
one result is a force-fed society with a vested interest in prodigality and
with no end in sight to the need for ever-greater and more wasteful
consumption.
Now we come to the harder part of the book from the authoranalyst's viewpoint. It is far easier to try to diagnose a developing
situation than it is to assess what this situation implies for the future, or
suggest what if anything can or should be done about it. In this instance
it is particularly true because the situation developing in the United
States appears to be unique in the history of mankind. There are no
obvious precedents to cite as guide marks for present or future action.
In a most tentative mood let us try to comprehend the implications
of a system that demands that its people engage in ever-greater
consumption.
First of all, we should note that this system, despite any current
excesses, has brought the American people to one of the highest levels
of physical well-being the world has ever known, exceeded only,
perhaps, by New Zealand's. And this is no mean accomplishment to be
deprecated. Haunting anxiety about where one's next meal or pair of
shoes is coming from has become but a memory for all but a small
proportion of the population that is unemployed or lives in rural slums
or is engaged in migratory work. A Negro bootblack in Oklahoma
proudly showed me his pair of thirty-dollar cowboy boots.
Further, we must recognize that every operating system devised by
man has its shortcomings and unpalatable aspects. It is no accident that
all economic Utopias have remained ideals. Any real-life economic
Utopias that man could devise quite probably would soon prove to be
dull, if not unworkable, to consumer and seller alike.
And, then, there is the uncomfortably challenging point to be
recognized that perhaps the United States has no acceptable alternative
to ever-rising and wasteful consumption. I don't agree, but this
viewpoint deserves respect. Mr. Kouwenhoven, cited at the outset of
this chapter, is a dispassionate social observer, not an overheated
marketing man. He tells of seeing American national forests strewn
with beer cans. The beer cans are to him symbolic of the thoughtless,
throwaway wastefulness of Americans in regard to the nation's
resources. He suggests that there may well be "a rather tricky
relationship between waste [symbolized by those beer cans] and
abundance." Can the United States have one without the other? Is such
wastefulness becoming a major factor in keeping the wheels turning?
The Wall Street Journal commented on the acknowledged wastefulness
of the United States economy by arguing that the real waste would be to
kill the goose.
Some economic analysts and marketers shudder at the mere thought
of American consumers returning to a prudent, rational approach to
buying. They are not sure what might happen to the national prosperity.
The Wall Street analyst Paul Mazur, in The Standards We Raise, asks:
"Just suppose that . . . the factor of obsolescence were to disappear from
the scene?. . . . What would happen to a market dependent upon new
models, new styles, new ideas?" Retailing Daily quoted an appliance
dealer as expressing fear that his annual sales would be slashed
drastically if he couldn't lure prospects with frequent changes in color
and gadgetry.
A number of economic writers have argued that the annual style
change in motorcars, which we have discussed, has become essential to
the economic well-being of the entire nation. When the 1959 model
motorcars were unveiled, the most notable changes were stylistic. Tail
fins jutted in every direction. The dual headlights were shifted into new
positions. The silhouettes were made still lower, still wider, still longer.
And there was still more unneeded horsepower. Also, as usual, the price
tags were higher than the year before. In short, these motorcars
represented the high point of progress through styling obsolescence.
The offerings might well have been considered an affront to the
intelligence of the American people. Yet in announcing these
motorcars, responsible magazines carried such somber headlines as:
"THE FATE OF OUR ECONOMY RIDES WITH THE 1959 CARS." 1
And respected economic writers offered such observations as "The
response to the new cars this fall will be of enormous importance to the
nation's economy." Writers pointed out that one American worker in six
now owes his job, in one way or another, to the motorcar industry. Even
drive-in theater owners and owners of roadside motels are dependent
upon Americans having a superabundance of motorcars.
Perhaps the most vigorous stand ever taken to justify the
consumption of unneeded goods came back in the thirties, when
marketers were first perceiving the challenge of the need for evergreater consumption. A writer discussing the new concept of
"obsoletism" in Printers' Ink made a comment that sounded startlingly
like a line that might have been in Huxley's Brave New World. He
stated earnestly:
"Any plan which increases consumption is justifiable. . . . People
are persuaded to abandon the old and buy the new to be up to date. Does
there seem to be a sad waste in the process? Not at all. Wearing things
out does not produce prosperity, but buying things does. Thrift in the
industrial society in which we now live consists in keeping all the
factories busy."
Even assuming that force feeding has become inevitable, Americans
still do not have to like it. And it seems reasonable that they should at
least understand the price they are paying for the force feeding and the
attendant preoccupation with consumption. Let us look, then, at a few of
the prices that Americans appear to be paying:
The preoccupation with consumption is starting to make Americans
look a bit fatuous in the eyes of the world. A few years ago, the
industrial designer Raymond Loewy commented that nothing about the
appearance of the nation's fat, gleaming automobiles "offsets the
impression that we must be a wasteful, swaggering, insensitive people."
When the United States opened up its gigantic 1959 exhibition in
Moscow's Sokolniki Park in an effort to win the admiration of Russia's
people, a New York Times reporter called it "a glittering, colorful
acclaim of consumer America. It is chock-full of the frills of American
life." The reporter expressed his puzzlement that amid all the dazzle no
unifying theme or overall message seemed to emerge.
Other reports indicated that many of the millions of Russian citizens
viewing the exhibit likewise were puzzled by the American sense of
values. They kept asking why so little stress was placed on such things
as education and medicine. Some of this may have been deliberate
heckling, but the reporters suggested that a genuine mood of
puzzlement seemed to be involved.
The wastefulness of the United States has made its market more
open to goods produced abroad. In earlier years, when North America's
advanced technology was the wonder of the world, foreign
manufacturers usually relied largely on lower-cost labor to enter the
United States market. And American industrialists still justify the use of
more and more labor-saving automation as their way to meet foreign
competitors who have a seeming edge because of their substantially
lower labor costs, even though their labor costs, too, are rising as their
productivity rises. One American steel company, which has been having
difficulty selling barbed wire for farm use because of low-priced
European wire available, hopes to use technology to maintain a
competitive edge. It is perfecting a machine that will go onto a farm and
lay fences automatically for the farmer. In this way it hopes the farmer
will find that the total cost of wire and installation will be less if he
orders this company's wire.
Today, however, the United States has lost most of the edge it held
in technology, skills, and resources. Vice-Admiral Hyman G. Rickover
has observed that the notion that modern technology is a unique
American achievement is an "illusion" that has been "nourished by our
mass media, advertising having made of bragging a fine art. To look at
the . . . jubilant reports of new inventions, discoveries, gadgets, and
nostrums one would never guess how much we owe to Europe in basic
research—that fountainhead of technology."
Many American companies have weakened their competitive
position by their preoccupation with producing obsolescent goods and
devoting ever-greater amounts of their budgets to sales promotion and
advertising. Overseas producers have discovered that they can often
beat the American competition just by providing a better product—
better in quality, function, and durability.
Product Engineering carried a report in mid-1960 of an industrial
designer who related that in talking to prosperous people in San
Salvador he found they were buying their typewriters, radios, and
refrigerators from countries other than the United States. One plantation
owner said that he now refused to buy American products because of
the difficulties of getting them repaired. He felt that products from other
countries were likely to be better engineered. A devastating comment
on this foreign "invasion" appeared in the trade journal Leather and
Shoes: 2
Despite all the publicity given foreign "cheap labor," it said this
factor can no longer be cited factually as the lone advantage that
European producers have over American producers. It noted that the
overseas producers were no longer confined to selling the United States
such things as toys, novelties, and textiles but had expanded to technical
and scientific fields which require a great deal of precision and knowhow. It pointed to the electronic equipment now "pouring into our
country from Europe and Japan . . . transistors and radios . . . cameras,
scientific instruments . . . and precision machinery." It argued, for
example, that Japan could not sell cameras, transistor radios, etc., in the
United States—regardless of price—if "their workmanship were not
high grade."
The journal cited four reasons why the invaders were able to give
the United States stiff competition on its own ground: rising
productivity, careful marketing, "better choice of items to fit consumer
wants and needs," and, finally, "better craftsmanship."
Perhaps the journal's most searching criticism of American
producers was in this sentence:
"We pride ourselves in our marketing alertness but it was Europe
which first saw the promise of the smaller car, the economy sewing
machine, the light-weight bicycle."
It is possible that the Americans had not overlooked these
possibilities but instead had actively tried to avoid them because of their
lower unit profit.
In late 1959, Home Furnishings Daily carried a report on cornercutting in the electric-houseware field that was bringing a debasement
of quality in several lines. Its investigator quoted one spokesman for
independent housewares repair shops as declaring that "Japanese and
German electric housewares would be known for their quality within a
few years while American electrics would be 'famous for low price and
low quality.' He claimed that this comparison already was true in some
cases 'where only a year or two ago that would have been a ridiculous
statement.' "
The growing reliance on promotion to sell goods is encouraging the
rise of business oligarchies. In a market where heavy reliance is placed
upon the skills of promotion, advertising, and display in order to
command the consumers' interest, large producers have a clear
advantage over the small ones because they can command greater
image-building resources and can maneuver—as by issuing a profusion
of brands—to gain greater display for the company's output. Writer
John Ness discussed in The Atlantic Monthly the failure of most of the
smaller automobile manufacturers during the fifties and stated: "Clearly
the great edge of the great companies lies in the vast advertising budgets
and marketing organizations—the standard brand, the slogan dinned
into the subconscious."
The outpouring of goods and people which marketers are counting
upon will change the style of life in the United States. Even though
consumption continues to churn upward, it seems inevitable that the
United States will see a real decline in the amenities of life.
If marketers have their way, American citizens will have at least
forty million more vehicles on the roads by 1975. Millions of acres of
land will be bulldozed for highway rights of way. More elevated
highways will slash into the cores of American cities to try to loosen up
the congestion. Such highways, by their size and divisive nature, seem
to demean the cities they are designed to rescue. Despite the thruways,
urban experts predict that congestion will grow faster than relief of
congestion. When one magazine forecast that in a decade most
American families would have two cars in every garage, a Boston
reader wrote back that if the prediction came true then "we'll also need
two hospitals in every block."
Many European cities likewise were finding that Europe's soaring
output of motorcars was forming massive clots in their central areas
during the hours of maximum traffic. Anyone trying to cross Geneva's
main bridge or the Place de la Concorde in Paris in late afternoon
knows that colossal traffic jams are not unique to America. Although a
smaller percentage of European families own cars than do American
families, there are as many motorcars per square mile in many European
countries as in the United States.
And what will happen when, to the delight of marketers, a hundred
million more customers are crowded into the United States by 1980?
Most of this growth, whether Americans like it or not, will take place on
the perimeters of present cities rather than in the inhospitable wilds of
the Dakotas. (Those two states are among the nation's slowest growing.)
Already bulldozers, like droves of army ants, are chewing up the
loveliest pastoral settings outside such cities as Boston, Philadelphia,
and San Francisco. William H. Whyte, Jr., in the book, The Exploding
Metropolis, estimates that bulldozers are flattening three thousand acres
every day as "urban sprawl" spreads. Great metropolitan areas once
widely separated are starting to bump up against each other.
Metropolitan Dallas is bumping into metropolitan Fort Worth;
Cleveland is on the verge of bumping into Akron; Hartford and
Springfield have almost merged as areas; and even those two great
colossi, metropolitan New York and metropolitan Philadelphia, are at
the point of colliding—and swallowing up the breadth of the sovereign
state of New Jersey between them.
Suburbs that were once semirural in character are being transformed
as the population explosion produces subdivisions, gasoline stations by
the hundreds, roadside stands, and light industries. W. L. C. Wheaton,
director of the Institute for Urban Studies at the University of
Pennsylvania, points up another important characteristic of this urban
sprawl. It is low-density sprawl. In the suburbs each family expects to
have its own little plot of ground, and so takes up more land space than
a city dweller. Thus, he says: "Cities will spread out over vastly larger
areas than ever before. Indeed, it is not unreasonable to expect that the
next hundred million urban residents will occupy five or six times as
much space as the first hundred million." Those suburbanites who
formerly lived in working-class areas of cities at least are getting a little
more air and elbow room. Residents on the outer edges of metropolitan
areas will have to go thirty to fifty miles just to get "downtown," if their
place of work is near the core of the metropolis. It is partly to ease this
growing strain that many business plants and offices are moving into—
or setting up branches in—the perimeters and in previously rural areas.
As for homes, residential sites that still have a "view" in Los Angeles
now cost up to $100,000 per acre. Metropolitan Los Angeles spreads
over an area that would engulf the entire state of Connecticut.
Dr. Wheaton points out another hardly cheering characteristic of the
suburbs that will appear by the late sixties. By then, nearly 40 per cent
of the inhabitants will be teen-agers, who have a high degree of
velocity, audibility, energy, and visibility.
At least one population expert (P. K. Whelpton) has estimated that
ideally, from the standpoint of individual economic well-being, the
United States population should have stopped growing at around
110,000,000. Others feel that figure is too low. What is optimum for a
Henry David Thoreau who loves the grandeur of a lonely stretch of
beach would be decidedly different from the optimum chosen by a harddriving subdivider. At any rate, the quiet places of beauty where people
can meditate and recuperate and exhilarate are disappearing at a very
fast rate. Once lonely lakes are crawling with powerboats roaring out
gasoline fumes. Ohio's beaches on Lake Erie are fast disappearing. At
this writing it is unclear whether the tiny stretch of fine Indiana dunes
can be saved from groups that want to establish industries there. Many
of the beaches on Lake Ontario, in western New York State, are
developing a stench because of the contamination of the water by
chemical plants in the area.
Twice as many people already crowd into national parks as can be
comfortably accommodated. One of the nation's loveliest remaining
stretches of open ocean beach on Cape Cod, south of Provincetown, is
showing subdivision signs. And on Cape Cod a newspaper sadly
commented on the "spreading carnival atmosphere on the Cape" and
said there is "less and less to hold the tourist seeking Cape atmosphere
and scenery. Our historic places are hidden. Our populous beaches
aren't what they're looking for."
Further crowding also promises to aggravate grievously the nation's
already serious problems of water and air pollution. Even before
Americans put those forty million additional motorcars on the road,
many citizens are gasping for fresh air. Hundreds of billions of cubic
feet of exhaust fumes are pushed out into urban air each day and are
starting to put many cities in addition to Los Angeles under a pall. An
official of the United States Public Health Service warns that "the
amount of chemical junk in the air will grow astronomically as time
goes by." The rivers of the nation from which dozens of down-river
towns are dependent for drinking water have become dangerously
polluted with industrial wastes, household detergents, and sewage-born
microscopic worms called nematodes. The nematodes are proving to be
able to survive chlorination and give tap water an earthy, musty odor. In
one check by United States health officials, drinking water from thirteen
out of fourteen rivers sampled had nematodes.
In many suburban areas where homes are dependent upon septic
systems and private wells, so much detergent has been seeping into the
wells that water drawn from the tap has a sudsy head. Commenting on
the growing problem of such pollutants as nematodes and detergents,
U.S. News & World Report observed: "As population rises and demands
upon the nation's water supply grows . . . these problems will multiply."
Several northern New Jersey cities had to find, hurriedly, new water
sources when pollution of the Passaic River reached the point where
thousands of fish were found dead.
Then there will be the spiraling costs of supporting the growing
urbanized population with its demand for many services. As a
metropolis grows, it costs more per person to operate the city.
And we should not forget those tens of millions of additional
school-age youths that the marketers are happily viewing as their
customers of the future and the present. They will need to be supported
and educated. By 1970, a majority of the American population will be
either under or over the breadwinner age.
Sharply increased population may bring momentary prosperity to
producers and sellers of consumer goods, but it is likely to bring more
grief than benefit in the long run to the general economy and the general
public. Some businessmen are beginning to sense this. A vice-president
of the Ford Motor Company surveyed all the complications that an
upsurge in population promises to bring and stated: "There can be no
doubt that the increase in population will reduce the rate of
improvement in our standard of living."
A final price American citizens will almost certainly have to pay for
increasing-sales-through-increasing-population will be curtailment of
individual liberty. There is often a tendency to have less respect for
individuals in densely populated areas or nations. And there is a greater
demand for intervention by government to solve problems that have
grown beyond the possibility of solution by individual intervention.
Perhaps the most eloquent warning ever to appear on the hazards of
seeking prosperity through population growth comes from an
economist, Dr. Joseph Spengler of Duke University. He points out, in
The Harvard Business Review, the common tendency in thickly
populated countries to try to relieve intensified social and economic
problems attending increased population by state intervention and adds:
"Should this come to pass the economy will become less flexible
and the freedom of individuals to do as they please would tend to
become highly circumscribed. In this event the stork would have
managed to do what the followers of Marx have found themselves
unable to do for all they tried—fasten fetters on mankind."
Now we come to three prices that American citizens are paying for
a force-fed society which are so momentous in their implications that
they deserve exploration in separate chapters.
CHAPTER 18
The Vanishing Resources
"We Americans have used more of the world's resources in the
past 40 years than all the people of the world had used in the 4,000
years of recorded history up to 1914. . . . Man is becoming aware of the
limits of the earth."—FAIRFIELD OSBORN
THE AVERAGE AMERICAN FAMILY THROWS AWAY ABOUT 750 METAL
cans each year. In the Orient, a family lucky enough to gain possession
of a metal can treasures it and puts it to work in some way, if only as a
flower pot.
When the President's Materials Policy Commission surveyed United
States consumption patterns in the early fifties, it concluded that "the
United States' appetite for materials is Gargantuan—and so far
insatiable." It found that each individual man, woman, and child was
using up an average of eighteen tons of materials a year.
Other estimates have suggested that the average American requires,
for his style of life, ten times as much raw materials—not counting
food—as the average citizen of the rest of the free world. Only in
America would a housewife hop into a two-ton vehicle and drive
downtown to buy the thumbtacks that she forgot to buy on her regular
shopping trip. And only in America do people in midwinter warm
themselves almost entirely by the wasteful method of burning thousands
of gallons of oil to heat up a house rather than by getting much of their
warmth by wearing warm clothing.
The virgin continent that American settlers fell heir to a mere three
centuries ago is being stripped of its material riches at an everaccelerating rate. This wealth has made chronic optimists of the people
of the United States. There has been so much wealth that they have
come to assume there will always be more where that came from. As an
American, Rowland Howard, observed in the last century, "You never
miss the water till the well runs dry."
Today, however, the weight of the evidence does not support much
optimism. Even by the early fifties, the Materials Policy Commission
was observing: "The plain fact seems to be that we have skimmed the
cream of our resources as we now understand them." Since then the
skimming has cut down into the milk still further. Today, Americans are
consuming considerably more materials than they produce. The United
States must now depend on other lands for most of the "strategic and
critical" materials essential to the nation's defense. The warnings and
recommendations of the Materials Policy Commission were largely
ignored.
Historians may say that the most fateful change occurring to the
United States during the first six decades of the twentieth century is that
during that period the nation changed from being a "have" nation to a
"have-not" nation in terms of essential natural resources. On December
9, 1958, The New York Times carried this memorable front-page
headline: "DANGEROUS DECLINE FOUND IN U.S. NATURAL
RESOURCES."
In the four-part analysis that followed, Times writer Richard Rutter
left his readers with little ground for optimism. He found "an enormous
drain on supplies of vital raw materials" and added, "The survival of the
nation is involved. An assured supply of iron ore, petroleum, natural
gas, metals, coal, and a host of other materials is essential to the
strength of the American economy. Without these, the greatest
industrial machine would come to a halt." Later on he stated: "Run
down the list of the twenty-six most important materials ranging from
antimony to zinc. The 1975 outlook: The United States dependence on
foreign sources will range from 100 percent to 25 percent."
As the United States became more dependent upon foreign sources
for its supplies of vital materials, it of course became more vulnerable
to a cutoff in case of war or in case a foreign government chose to hoard
its resources or chose—or was induced—to sell its prized resources
elsewhere.
The United States dependency on foreign sources is bound to grow
with each passing decade at a violently increasing rate if the population
and the individual consuming habits of its citizens grow as briskly as
marketers hope they will.
It should not be long before even the most blissfully optimistic
American will recognize the truth of Fairfield Osborn's comment in The
Limits of the Earth, "It is evident that, year by year, the entire problem
of adequacy of natural resources for the maintenance and development
of our civilization is becoming more acute."
Let us, then, look briefly at the present and future prospects of a few
of the main ingredients of the United States standard of living.
Metals. The high-grade ores of many metals found in the United
States are running out; and United States mills are mostly geared to
high-grade ores. The price trend of metals is upward. Steel, of course, is
the main sinew of American industrial might—and way of life. Most of
the United States steel mills require ore containing at least a 50 per cent
concentration of natural iron. Such rich ore is almost exhausted from
Minnesota's Mesabi Range, which was long considered to be
"inexhaustible." The amount of such rich ore left in known deposits in
the United States would not meet American needs for even a decade.
And these known deposits are at deeper strip levels or must be got
underground. Both make the ore expensive to get.
More and more, the United States is being forced to use thinner
ores, which require special treatment to get them up to a concentration
acceptable in the mills. The United States still has mountains of lowgrade ore (taconite), but such material must be ground down to a
powder and then molded into pellets. This process adds several dollars a
ton to the cost.
These expenses are driving the steelmakers into foreign lands in
search of ores suitable for milling directly. They have found—and are
vigorously drawing upon—such deposits in South America (principally
Venezuela) and Canada (principally Labrador and eastern Quebec) and
elsewhere. Already foreign sources are supplying a third of the iron-ore
needs of the United States (the percentage of iron ore imported
quadrupled within a decade), and the percentage will continue to mount.
These foreign sources can meet the needs of even a profligate United
States for many decades assuming that the United States is not cut off
from them by warfare or the action of local governments or by
mounting competition from other industrializing nations. One can
reasonably inquire why United States residents should worry about their
growing lack of self-sufficiency when they can get resources elsewhere
in an increasingly interdependent world. Perhaps we should not worry,
if all goes well. But this situation does leave the United States more
vulnerable in case of war, revolution, or intensified competition for
access to the planet's irreplaceable resources.
Of the seven metals most needed in making steel alloys, only two
are in adequate supply from domestic sources.
The once-rich United States reserves of zinc and lead have become
so low that they are rapidly approaching the point of being uneconomic
to work. Domestic production of both has recently fallen to all-time
lows. United States deposits of bauxite—the base of aluminum—have
become of such poor quality that the United States hauls more than
three quarters of its supply from overseas.
Probably the most ominous depletion of a vital ore is occurring with
that lovely, versatile metal crucial to industrialization—copper. The
United States has been forced to resort to mining leaner and leaner
grades of the ore. Most copper ore mined today contains less than 1 per
cent of the metal, and much of the ore used is approaching ½ of 1 per
cent. Many mining companies are being forced to process six times as
much ore to get a ton of copper as they did at the beginning of the
century. Partly as a result copper costs have risen about 600 per cent in
three decades. Meanwhile, the United States has changed from being
the world's leading exporter of copper to being the world's leading
importer of copper. And overseas sources are showing signs of
depletion, and will be available in currently acceptable grades for only a
few decades at most. Meanwhile, United States marketers have been
promoting the use of copper as decorative gas lamps to hang outside
homes. And American women each year are throwing away several
hundred million brass lipstick holders. Brass is made primarily from
copper.
This developing exhaustion of copper is likely to confront the many
nations now starting to industrialize with a most disagreeable problem.
Can they industrialize at all if copper becomes more and more of a rare
and precious metal? Substitutes such as aluminum can be used in some
situations at a loss in efficiency but in some crucial uses in the power
industry adequate or acceptably priced substitutes are proving difficult
to find. Conceivably, further progress can be made in mining extremely
low-grade ores, but the gains here are likely to be relatively small.
Harrison Brown, the eminent Caltech geochemist who has taken a
long, hard look at United States reserves for the future, summed up the
copper situation in The Challenge of Man's Future in these words: "It is
clear that vanishing copper reserves will constitute a formidable barrier
to world development."
So much for the sinews needed by industry to expand to meet the
goals of United States marketers. What about the energy needed—and
the lubrication needed—to make the wheels turn and keep the homes
warm and bright? In 1956, the president of General Electric proposed as
a goal for the electric industry that it increase average home use of
electricity by two and a half times in a decade. More recently, a vicepresident of Georgia Power Company proposed that each customer be
induced to use 7,000 kilowatt-hours a year by 1969. In 1959, customers
were using barely half of that amount.
Fossil fuels. For energy the United States is dependent primarily
upon the so-called fossil fuels derived from organic materials laid down
millions of years ago: oil, coal, and natural gas.
United States consumption of oil, the chief source of the nation's
energy, has tripled since the end of World War II. With only one
seventh of the world's proved reserves of oil, the United States has been
consuming considerably more than half of all the world's production.
Superficially the United States seems overblessed with oil today.
Overeager or overgreedy producers have been probing the planet so
intensively that they have glutted the world market. However, the rate
of discovery of new fields in the United States has been declining in
recent years. Those discovered tend to be at the bottom of deeper and
deeper holes. In oil, the United States is clearly approaching depletion.
At today's rate of consumption—not tomorrow's—the United States has
proved reserves of oil sufficient to meet the nation's needs for thirteen
years. There have been several authoritative predictions that United
States oil production will "peak out" in the present decade. An official
of Ford has asserted that the United States will be "peaking out" on oil
within at least twenty years. It is known that deep in the rocks
underlying the United States are billions of barrels of oil, but their
location makes them presently unattainable at reasonable cost. Other
billions, possibly attainable, are assumed to exist. But a study made for
Resources for the Future, Inc., by Bruce C. Netschert, counted up the
hundreds of billions of barrels of crude oil still conceivably present and
noted that there had been a rather sharp decline in the oil discovered per
exploratory well and also an increase in average depth. This didn't mean
that ways could not be found to recover oil under the United States, but
the study commented: "A declining success level in the search for oil
may indicate that the limit of oil discoverable with current technology at
current costs is being approached." And it added, "There is general
agreement in the industry that spectacular innovations in discovery
techniques are improbable. . . ." Mr. Rutter concluded from his
investigation that the supremacy of the United States as an oil producer
was "drawing to a close." In the future, the United States will be
drawing more and more upon foreign oil fields, and this is putting the
United States deep into the hands of Arabian and Latin-American
politicians.
The United States will still have access for many decades to liquid
fuel that can be extracted from its reserves of shale and its still abundant
reserves of coal, but both processes are expensive, especially the latter,
and probably will remain so though some gains in producing efficiency
undoubtedly will be achieved. The cost of obtaining oil by conventional
drilling, at least in the United States, is likely to rise substantially in the
coming decade. And it is only when the price of crude oil becomes
sufficiently high that the wholesale mining of shale for oil will seem
economic.
If oil producers seem complacent about the growing inadequacy of
proved United States oil reserves, one reason may be that the growing
domestic scarcity does not directly threaten them. To them, the
important thing is the prospect of ever-greater demand for oil. They can
supply it by processing coal or shale or digging ever-deeper holes, all at
higher cost, of course. They will have the nation over a barrel. Dr.
Brown summed up the long-range world-wide outlook for fossil fuels
by observing:
"Within a period of time which is very short compared with the total
span of history, supplies of fossil fuels will almost certainly be
exhausted. This loss will make man completely dependent upon
waterpower, atomic energy and solar energy." As I'll show in a few
moments, this is not the altogether happy prospect that often is
envisioned.
Now we come to those crucial resources that have long been
considered among the outstanding symbols of United States abundance:
food, timber, water.
Food. United States granaries are bulging with surplus grain, and
per-acre yield of calories is still far lower than Europe's or Asia's.
Therefore, food would seem to be no problem for many decades. It
should be noted, however, that the exploding population of the United
States will greatly increase food requirements, while the same
expanding population will swallow up millions of areas of farmland by
covering them with homes, shopping centers, and factories. Meanwhile,
erosion is continuing. The United States has already lost a third of the
rich top-soil—average nine inches—that it had when the Pilgrims
landed.
Because of such foreseeable pressures, several authorities have
suggested that within two decades the farm lobby can relax its pressure
on the United States government and stop impelling the government to
subsidize the growth of unwanted food. All food then, quite likely, will
be wanted. U.S. News & World Report, for example, reported from
Washington: "A population increase may also bring about a solution to
today's troublesome farm problem. Some officials of the Department of
Agriculture are inclined to regard the present surplus as a short-term
problem." On the other hand the revolution on the farm due to
chemicals and pesticides may assure even an exploding population with
adequate food for quite a few decades.
Wood. As for timber, each man, woman, and child in the United
States consumes nearly a ton of wood products a year in the form of
pine-paneled playrooms, chairs, comic books, and so on. The nation's
stand of saw timber has shrunk by nearly one half since Teddy
Roosevelt's day. The chief of the United States Forest Service has
warned that by the end of this century the nation's original stand of
timber will have virtually disappeared and the wood industry will then
have no choice but to cut only what it can grow. Industry spokesmen
profess to be less worried about future supply of wood for lumber and
paper.
However, some of the major timber companies such as
Weyerhaeuser have finally taken action to work out a "perpetual yield"
for their timberlands; but in general the United States has at least until
very recently been taking down substantially more saw timber than it
has been replacing with new growth. One result is that the real price of
forest products—corrected for inflation—has doubled since the turn of
the century, and wood has become too expensive to use in many
situations where it has been traditionally used and where its qualities
make it ideal for use.
Water. The task of maintaining an adequate water supply for a
violently expanding population accustomed to heavy use of water
presents an urgent and immediate problem. The water needs of the
average American citizen have doubled in this century, partly because
of the demand for showers, flush toilets, air conditioners, dishwashers,
lawn sprinklers, and swimming pools. The really heavy users of water,
however, are industry—it ordinarily takes 60,000 gallons of water to
make a ton of paper or steel—and farmers, for irrigation. Farmers use
half of all water consumed in the United States. Geographer Gilbert F.
White of the University of Chicago asserts that the United States is
running out of water and will face serious difficulties within fifteen
years. He points out that many communities in western Texas and in
Arizona, by their irrigating and sprinkling, are draining their
underground water at a rate that far exceeds natural replenishment.
Water tables are falling. In some communities water is being withdrawn
twenty times as fast as it is being replaced. And in some areas of North
Dakota and Long Island, underground water levels have fallen so low
that further "mining" of the water is curbed by regulation. Most of the
towns in western New York State have a chronic water problem and
tens of thousands of residents regularly pay one dollar for a five-gallon
jug of cooking and drinking water.
Some arid communities such as in Hudspeth County, Texas, have
just about given up because of lack of water. Many cities in the West
are foreseeing the day when they will have to turn away all industries
that are large water consumers. Long Beach, California, recently sought
permission to start reclaiming for certain uses purified sewage water
which had been flowing into the ocean.
A select committee of the United States Senate has warned that
many signs point to an "impending water crisis."
Perhaps the taps won't literally run dry, but still the United States
resident will pay a price. The price was described by Harrison Brown in
these terms: "As time goes on we will see an ever-expanding network of
aqueducts, dams, reservoirs, sewage-treatment plants, and waterpurifying units. The penalties for the improvements will be greatly
increased cost of water and, above all, increased per capita expenditures
of energy."
United States residents tend to view all assertions about depleting
resources with equanimity. As optimists they know—and are constantly
reminded—that modern technology is building a golden future for them.
The atom will solve all their problems. The chemists will create entirely
new and magical resources to replace the vanishing old. And engineers
will build machines that can economically mine leaner and leaner seams
of copper, and substitutions can be made.
Some of this optimism undoubtedly is justified. Aluminum is being
used instead of steel in some instances to make electric light poles.
Pound for pound, aluminum is a much more expensive metal—largely
because so much more energy is required to produce it—but the fact
that it is light in weight and doesn't have to be painted still makes it
desirable. Aluminum is also starting to be used to make motorcar
bumpers and wheels. Again the pound cost is high, but the motorcar
makers are anxious to reduce shipping costs by employing lightweight
materials. There are abundant reserves of bauxite—from which
aluminum is made—overseas.
And plastics—which, lest we forget, are based primarily on
chemicals derived from petroleum—are proving to be acceptable and
feasible substitutes for metals in a number of uses. United States Steel,
for example, is now in the business of producing plastic pipe. Quite
possibly by paying a price we will come to plastic motorcars and even
plastic houses. E. I. du Pont reports that it has a new plastic called
Delrin that is tough enough to serve for many uses where metals have
traditionally been required, such as machine parts and fittings for
appliances. For many uses, however, the plastics now available are
clearly inadequate. There is presently slight possibility that they can
make adequate substitutes for steel in structural functions. Also their
vulnerability to temperature and their frequent tendency to shrink are
limiting factors, and their energy cost is often high.
The supply of steel also can be stretched, it now appears, from new
discoveries about the breaking point of steel. Engineers are finding that
steels in some uses and designs can safely take 15 to 20 per cent more
stress than was previously assumed to be true.
Yes. there will be many substitutions, including combinations of
material still undiscovered; and there will be much greater efficiency
achieved both in the use of materials and the operation of machines.
Still, it is questionable whether these advances will enable the United
States to maintain as pleasant an environment for the individual during
the last third of the twentieth century as existed during the first two
thirds of the century. The cornucopia of United States industry may still
pour forth a host of consumer products. And it is quite probable that the
United States can, by ingenious use of substitutes and new discoveries,
avoid passing any real peril point. But in general there will be more
straining, more expensive price tags on many of the amenities of life,
more shortages, and more obstacles to personal dignity.
The expected rise in the cost of petroleum, as the United States is
forced to turn more and more to shale and coal for oil and to oil shipped
from abroad, will increase, among other things, the cost of food.
Farmers will begin yearning for the good old days before they sold off
their horses as dog food and bought gasoline-guzzling tractors.
But what about the wonders promised by harnessing the atom to
produce cheap, inexhaustible energy? Subsidized atomic power plants
have been built. There has been no rush, however, to duplicate them.
The reactors are proving to be too expensive to build and operate to
excite private investors. Lawrence Halfstad of the Atomic Energy
Commission has explained, "Another widely held misconception is that
atomic energy will provide cheap power for the next generation. Power
from uranium is not going to be cheap soon."
As the advent of the Golden Sixties was being widely heralded in
late 1959, the sixth annual conference of the Atomic Industrial Forum
was held in Washington. The mood of the industrialists attending it was
distinctly doleful. The head of Atomics International Division of North
American Aviation, Inc., told the meeting, "Achievement of a true
commercial atomic industry has been pushed off many years." And the
financial weekly Barrons pronounced the whole program for
developing commercial nuclear power "a gigantic fizzle."
In addition to the cost, another complication dimming the prospect
of utilizing atomic energy in the long-term future is that the reactors
largely depend upon uranium for fuel, and the United States has in
known deposits only a decade's supply of uranium. If uranium becomes
a major United States source of energy, the United States will find itself
bidding on the world market for uranium within a short period. And
many other industrializing nations—with no coal supply of their own—
will be willing to pay a higher price than the United States should be
willing to pay as long as it has coal available.
Some observers see atomic energy based on the hydrogen-bomb
reaction of thermonuclear fusion as a possible way out. Hydrogen as a
source of steady energy is becoming at least conceivable as a result of
break-throughs in research; but here, too, there is considerable doubt
that a thermonuclear reactor can ever produce power economically by
today's standards.
A third complication that will arise if the United States turns
primarily to the atom as a source of energy is that the disposal of the
mounting radioactive wastes will become a monstrous problem. Many
United States coastal cities already are alarmed by offshore dumping of
the wastes.
Some modern soothsayers have been saying that ultimately the
world will get most of its energy by harnessing the sun. Gathering solar
energy by giant mirrors, etc., appeals to the artists illustrating wondersto-come, and we may come to it; but probably not happily. Solar energy
won't be cheap. Harrison Brown finds that using solar energy to
generate mechanical power and electricity will be more expensive than
nuclear energy "by a considerable margin."
One of the great technological promises for the future is that the
United States will find a cheap way to convert the water of its seas to
fresh water. Industrial statesmen have painted appealing pictures of arid
wastelands being converted into bountiful truck gardens, from Death
Valley to the Sahara. While miracles of transformation should not be
expected soon because of the cost factor, this is one of the more
promising challenges, and we will examine it in more detail in Chapter
24.
Another phase of the Golden Future widely predicted is that in a
few decades the world's food supply can be assured by taking algae or
plankton from the sea. Here the cost problem may well be overcome.
But the result will not be an improvement aesthetically on the diet of
today. Persons who have sampled plankton say it is no diet for joy. And
it is doubtful that algae will ever match as a taste treat the cherry pies
Grandma used to make (before pies went on the assembly line).
It should be recognized that in a scientific sense very few United
States resources will ever become really exhausted, if you are willing to
go deep enough or are willing to extract from extremely low-grade ores.
A hundred tons of ordinary igneous rock, Harrison Brown points out,
contains among other things: about 8 per cent aluminum, about 5 per
cent iron, about ½ per cent titanium, about 1/11 per cent manganese,
and about 1/100 per cent copper.
The factories of the future are likely to be giant chemical plants that
will gulp in rocks, sea water, and air and break them down into
industrially usable components. But such operations will require
fantastic amounts of energy and fantastically complex plants. Unit costs
of metals produced would inevitably be considerably higher than their
costs today.
Another uncomfortable thought that should be pondered is that most
of the developments which are supposed to produce a golden era require
fantastic amounts of fresh water. Nuclear power plants, plants for
drawing oil from shale, and plants for preparing low-grade iron
(taconite) for the steel mills are voracious gulpers of water. And if the
nation's exploding population is to settle the nation's open arid areas,
then air conditioners will be a required amenity of life. And air
conditioners are substantial water users.
Still more disconcerting, the task of making the United States
economy function will become so complex when resources are no
longer readily available that the lives of the human participants will
have to be more highly organized. Dr. Brown suggests that the complex
society of the future will require such an all-pervasive social
organization that the state will completely dominate the action of the
individual.
There is, however, another significant possible source of raw
materials which we should not overlook. That is the salvaging of
existing materials. Theoretically this can greatly ease the material
shortage since there are millions of tons of motorcars, refrigerators,
alarm clocks, and metal play wagons cluttering attics and landscape.
Much of it, however, is in town dumps or wayside gullies losing weight
each year as rust devours it.
In the course of pondering the wastefulness of modern Americans, I
visited a number of salvage yards from New Orleans to Connecticut. It
gives one a macabre feeling to watch workmen gut a 1951 passenger car
before it goes into the jaws of a giant crusher. The doomed car is
pushed on its side just as a butcher pushes over a chicken. Men with
torches deftly remove the front and rear ends and chrome. Then
gasoline is poured onto the body, and in a flash the upholstery, floor
mats, sky-blue paint, and other nonmetal parts are burned away. A crane
then drops the body into the crusher, which within a minute reduces it to
a solid metal bale the size of an orange crate.
This seemed like both a profitable and patriotic enterprise. But the
salvage operators I chatted with were a gloomy bunch. They were being
ruined, they said, and were glutted with "junker" motorcars and other
steel scrap that seemed to hold little interest to the steel companies.
Scrap prices by 1959 had fallen disastrously. Rubino Brothers in
Stamford, Connecticut, was reduced to trying to buy cars for $7 or $8
and selling the scrap for about $19. This left the company, on lucky
days, with a $2 profit on each motorcar crushed and shipped. In 1959,
the salvaging of unwanted motorcars in the United States had fallen to
the lowest point in recent years. Less than half as many motorcars were
sold for scrap as were sold new. Motorcars still are being sold for scrap
if the motorcar owner lives near an efficient scrapping plant, but
hundreds of thousands of cars are simply piling up in junk yards and
gullies.
What is behind this paradox of low scrap prices in the face of
shrinking iron-ore resources in the United States? A spokesman for the
Institute of Scrap Iron and Steel, Inc., told me that the recent drop in
demand for scrap is due to "technical changes in steelmaking which
serve to reduce steel mill use of iron and steel scrap. Under the
circumstances, of course, much scrap today is not being collected, a
great deal is being lost by being dumped, or through erosion."
One technical change occurring is the introduction of a muchdiscussed oxygen steelmaking process that uses much less scrap than
former processes did. Tom Campbell, editor of Iron Age, told scrap men
about the new development and pointed out still another factor working
to shrink steelmen's interest in scrap. He said that several major steel
companies now have hundreds of millions of dollars tied up in
investments in ore deposits in Quebec and South America and need to
get their investment back by using as much ore from those places as
possible. He said that such factors as these have created "an absolute
desire on the part of steel people to become less dependent on scrap and
apparently they have succeeded."
He gave to the scrap men this straight-from-the-shoulder advice:
"You are now facing some of the most difficult problems that any
industry could face. . . . I think that if there are anyboys among you, you
had better start looking for another job because the scrap industry is
only an industry for men."
Any realistic appraisal of the United States' prospects on resources
must also take note of the violently accelerated demand upon resources
by the other nations of the world. The demand for petroleum, for
example, is rising faster in the rest of the free world than it is in the
United States. Italy's landscape is starting to show many great, gleaming
gasoline stations. In Britain, the number of motorcars on the road has
doubled within a decade. And there is the fantastic world population
growth. Each year the world as a whole is adding the equivalent of the
population of France to its numbers.
Further, many nations have desperately ambitious plans to
industrialize; and their people have learned from American movies,
tourists, and advertisements to desire such things as telephones,
refrigerators, television, and motorcars. Joseph Spengler, Duke
University economist specializing in world population trends, points out
that shortages of materials available to the United States "will be greatly
intensified by the progress of population and aggregate consumption in
other parts of the world, since these other areas will be drawing
increasingly on relatively limited sources of supply, major access to
which has heretofore been enjoyed by Americans."
As industrialization spreads in Asia, Africa, and other areas where
per capita consumption of materials has been extremely low by
American standards, demand for raw materials and energy will expand
swiftly and produce scarcities that will force rises in price. If the rest of
the world—even with its present population—were to achieve the level
of material wealth enjoyed by the people of the United States, there
would be a sixfold increase in need for materials. Actually there is no
longer enough copper, tin, and lead left in the world to permit such a
duplication on the basis of today's technology.
As pressures mount for access to the available raw materials,
nations will tend to protect their own interests by restricting export of
materials that they know they will need for their own future
development. India, for example, possesses very little in the way of
fossil fuels. It obtains most of its inanimate energy by the burning of
dung. India, looking to the future, has clamped down on the export of
thorium. This element, like uranium, can be used in the production of
atomic energy.
In the future we are likely to see such actions as India's become
common. Brock Chisholm, former director general of the World Health
Organization, predicts that within a decade North Americans, who have
been using up half of the world's production of irreplaceable natural
resources, will be cut off from many resources now used in abundance
because many of these resources have been coming to a very large
extent "from heavily populated, over-populated countries." He asks:
"How much longer will North America be able to have the lion's share
of natural resources? Probably not ten years longer, because the other
countries are beginning to recognize that from their own point of view
the welfare of their own people and the world's welfare, perhaps, they
would be wiser to keep their own natural resources even though this
means somewhat slower development, to do their own manufacturing
and sell finished products."
Furthermore, some of the countries that have in effect become
colonies of United States corporations may quite possibly buy out or
throw out those companies. Venezuela is as good an example as any to
consider. It is now the largest supplier of iron ore to the United States
and a major supplier of oil. A study of its turbulent past would indicate
that the nation has probably not seen its last abrupt change in policy or
governing personnel. In early 1960, the moderately leftish government
of President Romulo Betancourt had to put down a small rebellion by
force. Suppose that ten or twenty years from now an opposition leader
on the order of Peron or Trujillo or Castro comes into power in
Venezuela with a highly nationalistic and perhaps anti-United States
orientation. Suppose also that the rest of the world is then bidding for
Venezuela's oil and iron. If such a leader decided to take over the
holdings of United States companies and sell most of the nation's iron
ore and oil elsewhere, what would the United States do? I put this
question to a number of American businessmen. None had a ready
answer. All agreed that such a turn of events would present the United
States with an extremely sticky problem and that the United States
should strive by skillful diplomacy to prevent such a situation from
developing.
It would seem inevitable that if the world's population and the
resources are not soon brought into a more tolerable balance, some of
the competition by nations for badly needed resources is likely to
generate ugly frictions that could explode into warfare.
The widely accepted notion that more population brings prosperity
is overdue for examination. It apparently is true that up until quite
recently more babies meant more business for industrialized societies.
The availability of resources and living space had not been a serious
problem. But for the future, businessmen who extol the wondrous
prosperity that a larger population—and more consumption per capita—
can bring for more than a short term are encouraging the nation to flirt
with serious trouble.
Sir Charles Darwin contends that in terms of population the United
States has become "one of the most dangerously increasing countries in
the world." Some, however, argue that while overpopulation is bad in
underdeveloped countries, it is needed by highly industrialized societies
in order to provide customers to keep the factories busy. Such a
viewpoint leaves out of account, at least as far as America is concerned,
the factor of diminishing resources. Professor Spengler, for one, has
concluded: "Population growth does not guarantee endless prosperity. . .
. It solves only temporarily certain problems whilst creating bigger
ones. It resembles the dope a sick man takes, only in the end to become
a dope addict, and hence sicker than ever."
More people and more per capita consumption will tend to force up
the prices of resources in short supply and ultimately produce a drop in
individual living standards.
Some businessmen are beginning to be apprehensive about the
widespread faith that prosperity requires more people. The senior vicepresident of the Mellon National Bank and Trust Company in Pittsburgh
has observed that "our rising population is creating pressures on natural
resources which in a number of respects tend to retard further increases
in material well-being." He said that the strain of going deeper and
farther for resources and using leaner and leaner veins all adds to unit
costs and is creating a "drag on prosperity." And Columbia University
economist Roy Blough points out that "undoubtedly one of the offsets
to increased productivity will be the increasing difficulty and cost of
supplying many kinds of raw material. . . . There can be no doubt that
some materials important to our industrial growth are likely to become
much more difficult and costly to get; and the country is becoming
increasingly dependent for them on other countries just when these
countries are industrializing their own economies."
When you add the further strain on resources that comes from the
proposals of marketers to persuade each citizen in the rapidly growing
United States population to increase his consumption, you are
compounding the strain. A projection of current population trends
suggests that the United States will have as many people within a
century as China has today. This trend can—and probably will—
change. But let us assume it does come to pass that the United States in
a century will have a population of more than 600,000,000 people and
that the United States is encountering intensified competition from the
rest of the world for resources available outside the United States. If
that occurs, what would happen to the high, wide, and handsome mode
of living Americans are pursuing today? The nation would be sucked
virtually dry of resources economically feasible by today's standards
within a very few years. Actually, such a possibility is not likely to
confront the nation. Something will have to give—either mode of living
or population growth or both—long before a mere century has passed.
CHAPTER 19
The Commercialization of
American Life
"How can the public absorb so much shrieking in the
marketplace?"—PRINTERS' INK.
ALL THE EFFORTS TO KEEP CONSUMPTION RISING—WHEN TAKEN
together—amount to an unprecedented saturation of American life with
pleas, hints, and other inducements to buy. The sheer dimensions of the
current and contemplated selling efforts are becoming a national
problem. Commercialization is becoming so all-pervasive that at times
it seems to be getting into the air the public breathes. The public is
under a fairly constant siege of hard sells, soft sells, funny sells, sly
sells.
More and more money is being set aside to create a demand for
each unit of goods to be moved. Money spent for advertising in the
United States has risen considerably faster than total sales have risen.
The money spent to sell motorcars is a case in point. The amount spent
per car more than doubled on almost every United States make of car
during the fifties, and for most makes the amount more than tripled.
As United States citizens are coaxed to buy more and more
quantities of goods that are not essential to their physical well-being,
more and more reliance upon the skills of professional selling experts is
required. It takes no persuasion whatever to induce people to buy
enough daily food to sustain them, but it does take persuasion to sell
them optional goods such as sixty-horsepower motorboats.
"Advertising must mass-produce customers just as factories massproduce products in a growing economy," stated the publisher of
Printers' Ink. He suggested that outlays for advertising might reach
twenty-five billion dollars by 1965. That meant more than doubling the
amount being spent to create want and discontent within a few years.
An official of General Foods reported that a typical American
family is exposed to 1,518 selling messages in the course of an average
day. And this does not include the material stuffed into the nation's
mailboxes: a total of sixteen billion pieces a year, or four times the
amount found in mailboxes a decade earlier. United States taxpayers are
charged an extra $190,000,000 a year to make up the deficit incurred by
the post office in delivering this "junk," or third-class, mail.
Members of this average family, he stated, are exposed to 117
television and radio commercials a day. Other studies have shown that
on television alone programs heard in the average home by one or more
members in a day carry nearly an hour of commercials. The growth of
messages beamed at the public over the airways is worth special note
because airborne messages are hard to ignore and because the public
presumably controls the airways in its own interest.
On a nighttime television network show it has not been uncommon
to find fifteen or more commercials packed into a half-hour segment.
Broadcast Advertisers Reports made a survey of the number of
nighttime shows packing six or more commercials into a fifteen-minute
segment. Such a load of commercials, it agreed, represented "extreme"
overcommercialization. During the week monitored, it found 389
instances of such extreme overcommercialization. It said the figure
would have been far worse if it had included daytime shows.
Officially, members of the National Association of Broadcasters are
pledged not to "triple spot" their commercials, or run three in a row,
back to back. The Broadcast Advertisers Report survey found 1,287
such triple-spotting "irregularities" by the seventy-one stations
monitored. It found 111 instances where four or more commercials
were run back to back. Other investigators reported instances in which
up to nine commercial messages of some sort were run in a row on
television.
The increase in commercials has complicated the life of television
writers, directors, and performers as they have tried to sustain their
moods of gaiety, tragedy, or suspense. In the spring of 1959, Peter Lind
Hayes gave up his ABC daytime show because of the "pressure-cooker
existence" the network proposed to inaugurate by cutting his hour-long
show to a half hour. He explained: "When you figure the number of
commercials we have to give, it actually takes an hour to do a half-hour
show. Can you imagine half a dozen commercial interruptions in thirty
minutes? That is what it would amount to." Garry Moore revealed that
he left daytime television "because, frankly, I couldn't cope with the
number of commercials we had to accommodate." And, in 1960, he
won a singular battle for his nighttime show by successfully demanding
that commercial interruptions of his hour-long show be limited to four
rather than the then-prevailing seven interruptions.
All this growing pressure of commercials has generally been
attributed to increasing costs by the media accepting them. Some
broadcasters, however, have resisted the trend and have seemed to
prosper by being able to offer an advertiser a medium where
competition for the listener's eye or ear is less frantic. New York's radio
station WQXR is one of several that made such a move. It reduced by
seventy-seven the average number of commercials it carried each day.
The tastefulness of television and radio commercials likewise has
shown signs of deterioration as the pressure to sell has mounted. Selling
messages for "intimately personal products" such as feminine-hygiene
products and hemorrhoid treatments are beamed into many living
rooms. At this writing, more than 140 television stations accept
commercials for the hemorrhoid treatment Preparation H.
When the National Association of Broadcasters announced it would
drop from membership stations carrying the hemorrhoid commercials,
several of the offenders—many of them National Association of
Broadcasters members—shrugged and went on using the commercials.
Three dozen National Association of Broadcasters stations chose to lose
their National Association of Broadcasters seal rather than lose the
revenue that came from broadcasting the commercials that were banned.
After the ban, in fact, the sponsor of the hemorrhoid preparation had
little difficulty in booking more than a million dollars' worth of
commercials on television. The National Association of Broadcasters
also frowned on commercials for "feminine hygiene products," but a
number of American stations reportedly went on using them.
Officials of the National Association of Broadcasters made a
distinction between commercials for "intimately personal" products and
those that were just "personal" such as laxatives, deodorants,
depilatories, toilet tissues, corn and callus remedies, and corsets. The
National Association of Broadcasters' Review Board announced that
commercials featuring these latter "personal" products were, while
"sensitive," perfectly all right but should be handled with "ingenuity"
and taste. Abuse had become so widespread that it issued a "guide."
Here are some of the suggestions:
Laxative commercials should avoid overdramatizing discomfort,
avoid duplicating the "mechanics of elimination," avoid words such as
"bloated" and "gassy." And the setting should be elsewhere than the
family bathroom.
Deodorant commercials should use the word "perspiration" rather
than "sweat" and should avoid photographic shots of armpits, at least
those of live humans. The public continued to see the armpits of Greek
statues.
Depilatory commercials also should keep out from under the armpit,
and should avoid focusing the camera on "unsightly" body hair.
Toilet commercials should avoid using the blunt term "toilet paper,"
should not have settings "associated with actual use," and preferably
should have an air of fantasy about them.
Commercials for remedies for athlete's foot, corns, and calluses
should avoid the word "itching."
Still, television viewers have to sit and watch ladies shaving their
legs to "protect their loveliness," watch pictures of toes throbbing for
lack of Outgro for their ingrown toenails, and hear that the sponsor's
girdle is never "clammy or sticky."
Great thrilling songs turn up with commercialized lyrics. That
haunting melody from Italy, "Volare," was converted within six months
of its introduction into the United States into a Camel cigarette jingle,
"Fumare." One of the memorable tunes from South Pacific came
pulsing over the airways with the words, "Wash that dandruff right out
of your hair." And that sentimental old song, "I want a girl . . . just like
the girl . . . that married dear old Dad" has been coming over the radio
with the words "I want a girl . . . just like the girl . . . that's in the
Rheingold ad."
The quiz-show frauds revealed, among other painful things, that in
order to sell products sponsors have not hesitated to use or misuse
people who are often symbols of respectability. Revlon's sales tripled
while it was sponsoring two quiz shows that ultimately became
involved in a national scandal.
Many television sponsors have insisted that the name of their
product be featured on a sign conspicuously displayed as a billboard
throughout the program. "I've Got a Secret" and the Lawrence Welk
shows have carried such signs. On one daytime variety show sponsored
by Nabisco, the master of ceremonies carries a large sign bearing the
word "Nabisco" dangling on his forehead throughout much of the
proceedings. During at least one day's program of "Keep Talking," the
sponsor's billboard not only was conspicuously in evidence but jokes
and "ad libs" were slanted to commercial benefit. And when television
with much fanfare presented Ernest Hemingway's The Killers, Buick
automobiles turned up in a number of the scenes of the show itself and
in one sequence in particular the camera seemed to linger on a Buick.
The sponsor of the program was Buick.
Despite all this increase in commercialization some—but not all—
advertising men have wanted still greater control of the total content of
the shows they sponsor. One producer, John E. Hasty, who had made
shows for both Hollywood and television, was quoted as arguing that
television could reach its full potential as an advertising medium only
when advertising men produced the shows. "TV viewers cannot be
regarded as an audience to be entertained," he said. "They are prospects
. . . for what the sponsor has to sell. This fact constitutes the show's
reason for being. . . . Thus in a TV production the selling motive stands
as the dominant factor."
He granted that showmen from Broadway and Hollywood might
possess certain important skills that affect scripts, talent, music, and
choreography and that they might be generously endowed with skill and
imagination. But, he asked, "Does this overbalance a seasoned adman's
experience in mass selling?"
Many sponsors tend to view their television vehicles as total
advertisements. The Institute for Advertising Research has begun
offering a new measuring technique called Television Program Analysis
which weighs the total value of a program as an ad for the company.
And an advertising trade journal in 1960 observed, "From all
indications, a better tailoring of program type to advertiser, and
commercial to program, is in the making."
Taken together, commercials and program in many cases accentuate
the values of a high-consumption economy.
Marketing consultant Victor Lebow summed up the powerful appeal
television has as a selling medium when he pointed out: "It creates a
new set of conditions, impelling toward a monopoly of the consumer's
attention. For the first time, almost the entire American consuming
public has become a captive audience. . . . Television actually sells the
generalized idea of consumption." Cases in point to support this theory
that television sells "the generalized idea of consumption" might be the
squeals and ahs of television audiences on panel shows when prizes
such as stoves, refrigerators, rotisseries, and matched luggage are
unveiled amid fanfare.
One might speculate also on what it does to a people's sense of
values—especially to children's—when discussions of significant
events are followed on television by announcers who in often louder
and more solemn voices announce a great new discovery for a hair
bleach. Or, to consider another kind of juxtaposition, a broadcast appeal
to aid hungry children in mid-1960 was followed immediately by a dogfood commercial.
Television, of course, has not been the only place where the
stepped-up effort to exert selling leverage on the public can be noted.
Some American newspapers, especially on Thursdays and Sundays,
have become so bulky because of many dozens of solid pages of
advertising that finding the editorial matter leaves the reader's arms
weary from turning pages. The chairman of the McCann-Erickson
advertising agency complained about the "advertising traffic jam" in all
media and said some Sunday newspapers were "becoming so filled with
advertisements that they can grow only so much more and still remain
portable." It was not the portability as much as the frequent difficulty of
finding any news amid all the ads that bothered the general reader.
Some of the news one found in some periodicals, it should be added,
upon inspection turned out to be advertisements. I have before me a
page from the Montgomery, Alabama, Advertiser that at first glance
seems to contain about half editorial matter and half advertising. But the
apparent news stories carry such headlines as "WOMEN, DON'T BE
OVERWEIGHT, LET DAHL TAKE YOU DOWN A BUTTONHOLE OR TWO."
Still further inspection reveals that up in the upper right-hand corner is a
small-type notice: "This Page All Advertising." In a Kansas town,
florists threatened to withdraw their advertising from the local
newspaper if it continued to accept funeral notices that contained the
objectionable phrase, "Please don't send flowers."
Certain of the magazines, too, showed the impact of commercialism
as their publishers sought to create an editorial climate attractive to
advertisers. In some cases, articles appeared which while possibly
appealing to readers were most certainly gratifying to advertisers and
potential advertisers. One of the mass women's magazines with a
primarily working-class audience carried an article called "What's the
Big Attraction?" in early 1960. Its illustration showed an attractive girl
surrounded by six handsome men. The article purported to show the
secrets of the Feminine Girl who is irresistible with the Water Cooler
Set. Before you were eight hundred words into this revealing article,
you were aware that she relied upon "hand lotions," "moisture creams,"
"cleaning fluid," "scarves," "fresh glove supply," "bath salts," "bath oil,"
"special foot lotion," "creamy depilatory," "silky -body lotion," "antiperspirant," "cologne," "cosmetics," "shampoos," "astringent-saturated
cotton balls," "nail enamels," "make-up shades," and "lipstick." Later
on, it also mentioned she is "a great milk drinker" and gets eight hours
of sleep a night.
Advertising messages have begun appearing in places where
heretofore they have been banned, usually on grounds of taste or public
policy. Entrepreneurs and public officials are proving to be willing to let
down the bars in order to gain extra revenue. For the first time in half a
century, thousands of buses in New York have been carrying
advertising posters on their exteriors. Many railroad terminals are so
crowded with billboards and commercial displays that it is difficult for a
traveler to find the announcement of departures. A New York television
station has begun beaming its programs into more than four hundred
supermarkets and into three hundred self-service laundries. In the stores
the housewife finds herself exposed to as many as eight television
screens and to about twenty commercials in the course of her average
shopping trip.
So pervasive have billboards become along many stretches of
highway in the United States, that even an outdoor advertising expert
publicly lamented that a journey he and his wife took to Florida had
been "ruined" because "hundreds" of miles of what would have been
beautiful highways had been lined with signboards. Lobbyists for the
outdoor advertisers have been charged by a New York state legislator
with keeping state legislators in their debt—to forestall restrictive
legislation—by giving them free sign space, or space at reduced rates, at
election time. An investigator for the Reader's Digest concluded that the
new 41,000-mile federal highway system would become "a billboard
slum" unless state legislators acted to prevent it.
In order to cope with situations that arise when states do outlaw
billboards along highways, an enterprising signmaker developed a
lightweight sign so gargantuan it can be seen from many hundreds of
yards away.
A still more ingenious entrepreneur has begun offering admen the
chance to plant their messages against clouds and mountaintops.
Unexcelled Chemical Corporation has been inviting advertisers to use
its giant magic lantern called Skyjector. It is capable of beaming an
advertisement one-half-mile wide against a cloud five miles away. And
the company expects that within a year it will be able to create its own
clouds if there are none handy. Columnist Inez Robb commented: "It
opens up the prospect of a horizon-to-horizon gray-flannel world with
the sky . . . available to nature lovers only in rainy weather; with
America's rocks and rills and wooded hills covered with gigantic
exhortations."
People who wish to stroll along the few public beaches of Florida's
Gold Coast are not able to let their fancies roam too far off the notion of
consumption. Every hour or so old biplanes roar along just offshore,
hauling hundred-foot-long sky billboards. And on the backs of hundreds
of ocean-front benches are tacked small billboards. Advertising men
offered to install benches in many downtown areas of Philadelphia—
and pay the city in addition $15 a month for each bench—if they could
merely plaster the backs with ads. The offer was rejected.
Some paperback book publishers have begun accepting paid
advertisements in their books. One book on child care has been carrying
more than a dozen full-page advertisements scattered through the book.
There has also been a notable upsurge in the introduction of
advertisements onto the screens of motion-picture theaters. The number
of national advertisers using this medium has doubled in three years. By
1960, more than four thousand drive-in theaters were exhibiting
advertisements to their paying customers, along with the entertainment.
Advertisers credited much of their new fascination with movie
advertising to the ironic fact that cinema's worst competitor, television,
has proved to be so effective in reaching the consumer. Furthermore,
television has conditioned the public to expect commercials along with
its entertainment so that public resentment toward advertising in
motion-picture houses purportedly has been melting. The fact that the
theatergoers are paying to be entertained—not seduced—seemingly
does not loom as an important distinction in their minds! Meanwhile,
advertisers using the movie screens have been finding they have an
even more captive audience than on television. The theater seats are in
rows so that there is less tendency for a person, when commercials
come on, to use the break in entertainment to make a dash to the
washroom or go for refreshment.
The growing difficulty in finding ways to break through what
McCann-Erickson's Mr. Harper has called the "advertising -traffic jam
in media" and reach the public's eye or ear has inspired him to suggest
that the advertising industry might have to help create new media. He
asks: "Won't we have to encourage the development of new publishing
properties? . . . Isn't it possible in the '60s that we'll require a fourth
network? Isn't it possible we'll need to invent an entirely new ad
medium?"
The growing pressure to move goods by more aggressive promotion
can best be seen, perhaps, in the changes taking place in the American
pharmaceutical industry. It has traditionally been cautious, courteous,
and restrained in bringing its drugs to the attention of the nation's
doctors and druggists. All that changed when the producers of bulk
chemicals moved into the field and initiated aggressive tactics which the
old-line ethical houses felt forced to imitate. As a result, the major drug
houses have begun pouring four times as much money into selling as
they do into research. In fact, they are spending about $5,500 on sales
and promotion for each doctor in the land. They inundate the doctors
with brochures about the new and old drugs. They send a swarm of
27,000 detail men into doctors' offices and drugstores to induce doctors
to prescribe their particular brands and to induce druggists to stock
them.
One such detail man in West Virginia told me there was now a
detail man for every twelve prospects, and he said that he personally
called on 129 doctors in each two-week period, as did many of his
rivals. A little arithmetic and projection produced a stunning thought. If
the other detail men were as energetic as he was, then detail men were
making many millions of calls on doctors each year. My informant
blinked at that thought but didn't contest it. He said he goes and sits in
the doctor's office with the patients to wait his turn—because patients
resent doctors who seem to let someone into their office out of turn.
Very often, he said, he may find another detail man already in the
waiting room. In that case he will leave and come back later, because
doctors don't like to have too many detail men in their waiting rooms at
one time. It discourages the patients.
One result of all this selling pressure is that doctors hear so much
about brand names that they usually prescribe by brand name rather
than by the generic or scientific name, as they were usually taught to do
in medical school. Brand-name drugs usually cost the patient a good
deal more than a non-brand-name drug filling the same specifications.
The average doctor influences the sale of about $20,000 worth of drugs
a year.
The growing recklessness of businessmen in many lines as they
have sought to keep sales rising is reflected in two extreme examples
worth noting.
The Hat Council, Inc., employed the services of a public-relations
expert famed for the success of his tactics, Russell Birdwell. Soon the
Birdwell firm was circulating under its letterhead a startling statement
on hat-wearing or rather non-hat-wearing by a psychologist whom the
Birdwell firm had discovered in Dallas, Texas. According to this
psychologist, "Men who go bareheaded . . . are betraying their feminine
instincts." Such a man is announcing to the world that "he doesn't want
to be a man."
Another sample of the extravagant devices used to catch public
attention was the advertising theme used by the maker of a nationally
advertised aerosol shaving cream. One advertisement pictured the side
view of a smiling, voluptuously proportioned girl with her posterior
thrust back conspicuously as she held a giant can of the cream. The
headline of the ad read: "IF YOUR CAN'S TOO SMALL TRY MINE FOR
SIZE." And another headline over the same sort of photograph had the
lady saying: "I HAVE THE BIGGEST CAN . . . AND THE BEST CAN . . .
AND IT COSTS THE LEAST. . . . "
As advertising men have found themselves with more and more
billions of dollars at their command, they have moved into a role of
considerable power in influencing the behavior of the entire populace.
They have become to a very large extent masters of the nation's
economic destiny, and perhaps the nation's most influential taste
makers. They have become dictators of the content of many if not most
radio and television programs, judges with life-and-death power over
many periodicals, and at least co-designers of many products being
offered to the public.
The rationale they have worked out to justify their new power is that
advertising is the bulwark of the American way of life. A Cleveland
billboard announced: "America is a Better America thanks to
advertising!" Admen recently have responded to criticism by becoming
quite aggressively defensive about their role. Charles H. Brower,
president of Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn, acknowledged that
perhaps admen had some housecleaning to do but he added: "The house
of advertising is a mighty fortress in our economy. . . . Pull down
advertising, and a frightening number of things will fall with it." The
heroic role of advertising in providing a "bulwark" or fortress for the
national way of life became somewhat hard or embarrassing to explain
in detail. More than half of all advertising dollars went to promote
cigarettes, alcoholic beverages, patent medicines, soap, and cosmetics.
Other advertising men preferred to put the contribution to a better
America in dollars and cents. They asserted that advertising brought
down prices by providing the mass market for mass production.
Undoubtedly this argument has a strong historical basis. And it was
advanced as recently as 1959 by Mr. Harper, whose agency had just
become the largest in the United States. But in the developing Age of
Abundance this argument was less convincing when you got down to
specifics. Why had the cost of automobiles, all intensively advertised,
risen every year for twelve years? Why did brand-name products
nationally advertised generally cost more than private brands of
identical quality? When the magazine Progressive Grocer sought to
explain the growing volume of private brands sold in American stores,
it concluded that "the most convincing clue" was the fact that they
generally cost the consumer less than the nationally advertised product.
And the price differential was growing. It now ranged up to between 10
per cent and 20 per cent. In the field of drugs and cosmetics, the
differential was even greater. A comparative study made in New York
City showed that nationally advertised brands tended to cost about twice
as much as "substantially identical" private brands of the same products.
(It should be conceded that many private brands are bought with
confidence only because the customers are buying the image of the
store's name—which often is intensively advertised.)
Many producing companies have begun playing both fields. They
promote heavily their own brand—say, a detergent—and quietly furnish
the identical product to stores to be sold under the store's private label,
at a lower price.
By 1960, even some advertising people were conceding that the
argument that advertising brought lower prices was starting to pass into
the hands of "cynics and disbelievers." Still, there is no disposition in or
out of advertising to doubt that advertising does indeed stimulate
consumption, especially in the case of products that are innovations or
are optional, or unnecessary. In that sense advertising has indeed
become the bulwark of the American way of life, and I certainly would
not be among those that Mr. Brower feels are trying to "pull down
advertising." Much of advertising is still simple announcement of
product performance and availability. It is time, however, that the
United States economy's growing reliance on advertising be carefully
assessed and appraised for its impact on American life.
The cost of getting the consumer's attention—or a "share of the
consumer mind," to use adman lingo—is getting higher every year
simply because of the competitive din. In 1959, Sales Management
made the point that for every dollar spent for advertising early in the
fifties an additional half dollar should now be added just to offset the
greater competition of messages. There were 551 different brands of
coffee on the market, 177 brands of salad dressing, and 249 brands of
powdered soap. A vice-president of the Batten, Barton, Durstine &
Osborn agency complained that "the amount of advertising in existence
today is staggering. It must at least have doubled in the last ten years.
There is no escape from it; no place to hide any more." His point that
consumers have "no place to hide any more" was made not out of
compassion for the consumer but rather as the lament of an adman who
is finding it harder and harder to get himself heard. Others complain of
encountering a "fatigue of believability" among consumers and of a
lowering of the customers' "credibility quotient." An editor of a trade
journal offered one hopeful thought. He said that "methods of
communication are perfecting themselves so fast that it's easier for
people to learn now."
The selling pressure is being turned up not only at the imagebuilding level of advertising but also at the over-the-counter level of
retailing. Spokesmen of the marketing industry have called for the
training of at least a million more "well-talented salesmen" by 1970.
Otherwise the expanded economy predicted for that year will be "stifled
by overproduction."
More and more stores are staying open nights and Sundays to keep
goods moving in ever-greater volume. A few years ago, custom dictated
that only stores dealing with necessities of life open their doors on
Sunday. By the sixties, thousands of appliance stores, clothing stores,
hardware stores, supermarkets, and automobile dealers were staying
open on Sundays. This trend is particularly strong in the West. In
California, 80 per cent of the supermarkets are open on Sunday. Many
stores in the Los Angeles area are staying open around the clock, seven
days a week. It is an eerie sight to arrive at the Los Angeles airport at
two o'clock in the morning and drive to a hotel. En route one sees
dozens of giant stores bustling with selling activities. Sunday has
proved to be an excellent time to move goods because the spirit of the
carnival prevails among the customers. Operators of shopping centers
affirm that on Sundays the people show less concern about getting good
values for their money than on other days. Another reason why night
and Sunday shoppers are especially prized is that at those times husband
and wife are more likely to shop together, and will buy 30 per cent more
than the wife would buy if she were doing the family shopping alone.
Merchandising experts are learning many strategies to keep
customers coming through the doors—and buying. The general
philosophy of the anonymous appliance salesman who wrote the series
for Home Furnishings Daily on selling techniques was summed up in
this self-justifying remark: "After all, the shopper walked into the store
looking to cut my throat. I just got to him first."
If a customer seems to be the polite, timid type, the salesman
explained, you nail him after the spiel by whipping up a bill of sale
"without a word from him." More often than not, this timid type
assumes he has somehow committed himself "and digs out a deposit to
spare himself embarrassment." If the customer seems resistant, you use
the warehouse trick. The item is selling so rapidly, you explain, that
there is only one left. So you call the "warehouse" and ask that the last
one be held for your prospect. He added: "My wife is quite used to
receiving such calls for me."
Another trick he recommended was the "burn and switch." The
salesman "burns" himself in order to excite the prospect's initial interest
by quoting a price at cost. Once the prospect's interest is stirred, "you
gently start to switch him to a make he hasn't even thought of buying."
You do this by confidentially explaining the shortcomings of the make
you had offered at such a bargain. The washer may have a filter that
rusts, or it is reputed to tangle clothing.
If the customer seems confused about which brand actually offers
the best value, the solution is easy. You strongly recommend the brand
that has the highest "spiff" or "PM" riding on it. The spiff or PM is the
"push money" offered as a reward for each item of the brand that is
sold. The salesman-author commented: "I've never seen so much spiff
money floating around as today with this tough competitive situation."
In many instances the PM or spiff is provided to the clerk by the
manufacturer's representative who is striving to increase his volume.
The sales manager of one major-appliance producer referred unhappily
to the spiff as "the new law of the land." And an industry survey
disclosed that spiffs were coming to play an important part in selling
lamps. Home Furnishings Daily carried a report from Boston in early
1960 that "spiffs from manufacturers have been a part of the bedding
business for so many years that they have become an institution." It
cited one salesman as estimating that the average bedding salesman
"adds $50 a month to his salary through spiffs. 'No salesman would ever
want the practice discontinued,' he says." And the same journal reported
from Detroit that appliance-television dealers in that area expressed
"qualified" disapproval of spiffs. It seems that "leading merchants
believe if push money is being offered it should be given to the retailer
to dispense, preferably in the manner in which he sees fit."
That pretty well sums up the morality of one segment of
entrepreneurs feeling the full force of consumerism.
CHAPTER 20
The Changing American
Character
". . . whose God is their belly . . ."—PAUL, Philippians 3:19.
A FINAL PRICE THAT MUST BE CONSIDERED IN ASSESSING THE
implications of the current drift of American society under the impact of
an economy based on ever-mounting consumption is the change it may
be producing in the character of the people involved.
What is the impact on the human spirit of all these pressures to
consume? What results are already beginning to appear as a result of all
the efforts to make Americans more hedonistic? What is the mere
availability of ever-greater material abundance doing to American habit
patterns?
Business Week made a report on the many subtle and adroit
persuasion techniques being developed to encourage Americans to be
more zestful consumers and commented: ". . . it looks as though all of
our business forces are bent on getting everyone to . . . Borrow. Spend.
Buy. Waste. Want."
It is unrealistic to assume that all such pressures are not producing
changes at a deeper level than mere consumption habits. For example, a
person who finds himself induced to spend beyond his income
habitually does not wish to feel guilty about his excesses and welcomes
a system of morality that condones such habits. Much of the average
American's consumption has been channeled into frivolous or playful or
whimsical outlets, which also requires rationalizing. United States
residents have been spending more on smoking, drinking, and gambling
than they have on education. They have been spending more on
admission tickets to pastimes than they have on foreign economic aid.
They have been spending more on jewelry and watches than they have
on either books or basic research.1 Further, they spend more for greeting
cards than they do for medical research.
The people of the United States have been thrust into making a
more abrupt transformation in their system of values since World War
II than in just about any comparable period of time in the nation's
history. Some of the changes in values, attitudes, and outlooks might be
considered most attractive or encouraging, such as the increase in
world-mindedness and the more accepting attitudes toward people
superficially unlike themselves. Some of the changes, however, are
directly related to the pressures and stimulations that encourage
Americans to increase their consumption, and those are what concern us
here. Joseph Wood Krutch believes that the transvaluation of moral
values required in adjusting to an economy of abundance is as drastic,
in fact, as any posed to civilized man since Christianity proclaimed that
humility not pride is the source of all virtue.2
These new pressures are causing ever more people to find their
main life satisfactions in their consumption role rather than their
productive role. And these pressures are bringing forward such traits as
pleasure-mindedness, self-indulgence, materialism, and passivity as
conspicuous elements of the American character. It is perhaps no
coincidence that the areas of the United States where the spirit of
hedonism is most rampant—Los Angeles, Miami, and Las Vegas—are
also among the fastest-growing cities in the land.
Whether this trend to hedonism represents regress or progress may
be arguable. It seems reasonable, however, that Americans should take
stock of the changes taking place. Then they can decide whether they
like them or not, and act accordingly.
If we try to visualize the future course of a society based so largely
on an ever-expanding economy as the American model, we must
conclude that it will require a more and more voluptuous mode of living
until the process is slowed by growing depletion of the resources
essential to support the voluptuousness. Another possibility is that
resisting citizens may modify the model.
Aldous Huxley in his Brave New World of the twenty-sixth century
appears to assume that the problem of diminishing resources can
somehow be managed. Or perhaps he did not take the resource problem
seriously into account, since the drain had not yet become critical when
he wrote his book in 1932. In any case, he has Mustapha Mond, the
controller of his highly regimented world state of the future, explain:
"But industrial civilization is only possible where there is no selfdenial. Self-indulgence up to the very limits imposed by hygiene and
economics. Otherwise the wheels stop turning."
In the current American model there is abundant evidence that rankand-file Americans are co-operating wholeheartedly in the task of
taking up ever-greater consumption as a way of life. Those who thought
that preoccupation with possessions—and consumption—might lessen
with the easing of the prod-dings of poverty did not take into account
the new proddings of the marketing persuaders. Preoccupation with
possessions instead has increased.
This preoccupation with consumption so assiduously nurtured by
the marketers is leaving its marks on the people involved. These marks
show up in a variety of ways. They showed up, for example, in the
study of "Interurbia" conducted by Fortune magazine, the J. Walter
Thompson advertising agency, and consultants from Yale University.
The particular interurbia—or massive metropolitan complex—studied
was the urban sprawl that stretches almost continuously from Portland,
Maine, to Washington, D.C. Because of its concentration of tens of
millions of humans, this has been a prime target of marketers for years.
The study reported that the typical consumer in this area is developing
characteristics that make him a superb consumer. He tends to be
restless, conforming, aggressive in his interpersonal relations, and
chronically has a "hunger for hard goods," to use one marketing
columnist's phrase. He may buy these hard goods—or consumer
durables—even when he has no real need for them, perhaps because he
has developed an inner need to keep buying things.
A perceptive writer on family life, Hannah Lees, has commented,
too, on the many modern women who seem preoccupied with getting
for themselves such things as wall-to-wall carpeting, completely
automated kitchens, fur jackets, and their own convertibles. She noted
that many such women—and they are in every income bracket—are
"going around with the uneasy feeling that without all those possessions
they would just disappear."
Some Americans have become so habituated to continuous
impulsive consumption through shopping that they are distressed when
the process is disrupted. During the 1958 recession, customers suddenly
started robbing the supermarkets blind to the tune of a quarter billion
dollars' worth of goods a year. In southern California, arrests for
supermarket shoplifting soared 50 per cent within a few months. It was
found that some mothers were training their children to slip parcels out
through the guard rails. One explanation for the great increase
apparently was that so many families had been committing so much of
their paychecks to installment payments that they were strapped for
food when the husband's overtime was cut back. Time magazine,
however, in citing the upsurge, suggested that a new morality might be
a major factor. It commented on "the easy conscience that assumes a
high standard of living to be everybody's right, whether the money is
around or not."
And some religious leaders have been speculating what is likely to
happen to the sense of proportion in living in a people that are
encouraged to become quickly dissatisfied with last year's models.
There is also the thriftlessness that is being so widely encouraged. A
syndicated columnist on family finance admonished readers to step up
their spending of any income they had after the "necessities" of life
were attended to. This counselor advised readers in early 1959: "If you
decide to save, pay off debts, you help slow down business. If you
decide to buy cars and appliances enthusiastically, you put a glow on
the entire country."
The absorption with consumption also unquestionably is having
some impact on family solidarity. Frequent purchase of such appliances
as dishwashers and clothes driers and prepackaged meals with their
"built-in maid service" has two noteworthy effects on family living; at
least at the lower-white-collar and working-class level. It tends to keep
the family strapped for money. And it tends to disenfranchise the wife
by depriving her of many traditional, time-consuming homemaking
functions. Both effects—the pinch for money and the growing lack of
challenge to women in the home—tend to send the wife out looking for
a job. A high-school official of a Chicago suburb told me that in that
town of skilled workers and white-collar workers "most of the mothers
of our students have jobs. Some students say they see their folks
together only on Sundays." A teacher in San Francisco has offered the
opinion that parents take less interest in their children's schoolwork. She
explained: "It may be because so many mothers are working.
Everybody has to have new cars, refrigerators, so they work. Often the
children lose out." If the trend toward working mothers continues—and
it seems likely—Americans might well consider adopting the Danish
system of setting up high-grade facilities for child care manned by
professionals.
All the preoccupation with consumption—and other forms of
materialism—appears to be having an especially heavy impact on the
attitudes of the young people of the United States being reared in the
new environment. A number of investigators are reporting findings that
hardly match our traditional concept of American youths as ambitious,
dedicated, self-sufficient, individualistic idealists who hope to build a
better world.
Two psychologists, James Gillespie of Colby College and Gordon
Allport of Harvard University, made a survey of attitudes of college
students around the world several years ago. It indicated that American
youths were more self-centered and materialistic in their aspirations
than were the youths of most of the countries surveyed. The
investigators asked eighteen hundred youths in ten countries to visualize
their future.
One rather conspicuous finding was the preoccupation of American
youths with the material aspects of their existence to the exclusion of
most other concerns. These young Americans knew pretty specifically
the kind of rich, full life they wanted to build. They talked in terms of
the hi-fi set they would have, the outdoor barbecue, the game room,
where they would take their first vacation, the kind of car they aspired
to, and so on. They showed little interest in making a career of public
service and little apparent concern for their fellow man. Professor
Gillespie commented on the intense "privitism"—or preoccupation with
their own small world—that seemed to characterize the American
students, who presumably were representative of the nation's leaders of
tomorrow. You get the feeling, he said, that a cloud of opprobrium hung
over participation in public affairs in the United States. (Possibly this is
because in an age of abundance challenging public problems seem less
apparent to youthful eyes.)
Mexicans, in contrast, were aglow with idealism and showed only
casual concern about the material surroundings of their lives. Six times
as many Mexicans as American students foresaw that their greatest
sources of pride would be in service to their nation. And a majority said
that helping others would be one of the goals of their life.
In the matter of teaching young children, the difference between the
youths of the two nations was interesting because the young students
from the United States tended to evaluate experiences on the basis of
their "fun" potential. Thus American girls who said they hoped to have
jobs working with little children explained in a number of cases that
such work would be fun. Mexican girls, in contrast, saw working with
small children as an opportunity to help mold future citizens.
Students in the various countries were asked, "If you should get a
large sum of money five years from now, what would you do with it?"
The American students had a different—bigger—idea of what was
meant by "a large sum of money" than the others. But more
significantly, only 2 per cent of the Americans thought of sharing such a
windfall with anyone beyond their immediate family. The impulse to
share the windfall with other people in need was higher in virtually
every other national group.
In this connection, we might note the observation of Rabbi Philip S.
Bernstein of Rochester, New York, who states that "materialism, the
pursuit of wealth, deadens sensitivity to other human beings." Might
such a deadening be a cause of the startlingly callous behavior of race
fans at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway when an aluminum tower
collapsed May 30, 1960? It occurred shortly before the big race was to
begin. Two men in the tangled mass died of broken necks, and seventy
persons—many of them screaming—were injured. Some people in the
crowd tried to rescue moaning persons from under the collapsed tower.
But, the Associated Press reported, "others on the ground and on other
near-by towers went on drinking beer and munching fried chicken,
concerned mainly with the start of the race."
Consider another study of the emerging character of American
college students. This more recent study was sponsored by the
American Council on Education. The provost of the University of New
Hampshire, Edward F. Eddy, Jr., and two assistants made a study of
attitudes on twenty American campuses by living with the students long
enough to win their confidence. Commenting on today's student, Dr.
Eddy said: "He is interested primarily in the maintenance of the status
quo—a very comfortable status quo, which makes him the sought-after
darling of business and industry." Dr. Eddy, too, commented on the
conspicuous "privitism" of the American student, who seems absorbed
in achieving "a rich, full life" for himself. (That phrase "rich, full life"
could come out of a General Motors advertisement.) Dr. Eddy
continued: "His strong interests are centered on the material benefits
which he and his family may be able to enjoy. . . . The constant question
is first: 'What's in it for me?'"
Brains, it might be added, appear to be no defense against the
materialism of the age. The president of the National Merit Scholarship
Corporation reported on the aspirations of the National Merit
Scholarship finalists. He said that "to an astonishingly large extent
[they] look forward to the easy, pleasant life in the suburbs with ample
income for the material luxuries. Very few speak of a willingness to
work for ideals or to pursue knowledge no matter what the cost."
So far we have talked mainly about the emerging attitudes and
character of students in the United States. The Korean War, on the other
hand, provided a testing ground of sorts for American youths of all
ranks. For several years after that war, the Army conducted a painful
study to try to account for the fact that so many of the American men
who became prisoners became collaborators, or showed appalling
selfishness, or just curled up and died. A third of all GI's captured
engaged in some form of collaboration, and more than a third died in
captivity. And most startling, twenty-one of the men captured—for the
first time in history—did not choose to return home when first given a
chance. In contrast, of the hundreds of Turkish soldiers who were
captured, virtually all of them withstood all pressures to induce them to
become collaborators. And although half of the Turks were wounded
when captured, not a single one of them died in captivity. An Assistant
Secretary of the Army has called the Army's findings about the behavior
of American prisoners in Korea "distressing." Writer Eugene Kinkead
talked with many Army officers involved in the post-mortem. One
Army doctor involved in the analysis told Kinkead he could only
conclude that "a new softness" had come into the character of many
young Americans. He said they seemed to lack the old Yankee
resourcefulness of their fathers.3
An official of the United States Department of Justice is still
another who has been forced to ponder the impact of the materialistic
culture of the United States upon its youths. He was trying to
understand why youthful lawlessness was rising at such a "startling"
pace. At the present rate, by 1962, one million American teen-agers will
be arrested each year. He was forced to the conclusion that "we seem to
have misplaced the sense of values which made this a great nation. Selfindulgence and the principle of pleasure before duty on a vast and
growing scale have become a phenomenon of the adult world. These are
warning symptoms of the decadence disease which has contributed to
the decay of so many civilizations throughout history." Then he asked
bluntly:
"When children, without discipline and without moral standards
implanted in a stable home, are thrust into a culture in which pressures
from every direction promote the principle of self-indulgence, what
reaction can be expected?"
The juvenile delinquent in the United States, he concluded, "is a byproduct of our self-indulgent age."
A good many citizens in the United States, it should be emphasized,
are beginning to feel vaguely uneasy about the impact of ever-greater
consumption on their lives. Investigators for The Chicago Tribune
reported—in The New Consumer—finding a good many people ridden
with guilt feelings because of all their purchases. One housewife, cited
as typical, said: "After I've been shopping, I often feel guilty about
having spent too much." Such guilt feelings, however, seem to be more
characteristic of women in the older settled areas of Chicago than of
those in the new suburbs. Some of the comments by women in Golf, the
more prosperous of the suburbs studied, indicate that even in the
changing suburbs there is a good deal of uneasiness about the growing
materialism. The investigators reported that most of the residents felt
they were more adept at the art of making money than their own parents
had been. Then the investigators added:
"Some of them, however, feel that, all questions of money aside,
their parents had something that they admire but lack—the capacity to
use their own inner resources. This is a capacity which will be even
more strongly lacking among the Golf dweller's children, who may be
expected to be extraordinarily thing-minded people."
At least some American businessmen, too, have been uneasy about
this growing thing-mindedness created to a large extent by the pressure
for ever-mounting consumption. Business Week, which certainly is on
the side of the sellers, concedes that "many people are upset by what
they see as an enormous emphasis on materialism and triviality and as a
saturation of American life with the false standards of the market
place."
In the late fifties, a marketing and economic consultant from
Chicago, Theodore Levitt, kicked up a tremendous furor in business
circles by urging businessmen to stop fretting about the social
implications of what they were doing. His comments appeared in The
Harvard Business Review ("The Dangers of Social Responsibility"),
Sales Management ("Corrupting Tender Souls"), and Advertising Age.
This last offered a presentation by Dr. Levitt entitled: "ARE
ADVERTISING AND MARKETING CORRUPTING SOCIETY? IT'S NOT
YOUR WORRY, LEVITT TELLS BUSINESS."
Dr. Levitt discussed "management's mission in the new society." He
said it was quite possible for many businessmen to conclude that they
were contributing "to decadence, self-indulgence, materialism,
cynicism, irresponsibility, selfishness. . . ." He cited questions being
raised by the prospects of achieving ever-higher consumption. What
would this do to people's dignity, their culture, their spiritual values?
Would their standard of living actually be higher simply because they
were persuaded to throw away earlier models faster? And what are the
effects of manipulation by persuaders? Dr. Levitt conceded that
conceivably marketers could eventually become so successful in
"loading people up with redundant goods, creating superficial and
vulgar wants, and generating the kind of opulence that turns luxuries
into necessities," etc., that perhaps "we will get soft and decadent and
finally drift down into a quagmire of decay that was Rome's fate."
"But," he quickly added, "let's not go overboard in an orgy of moral
self-flagellation. A lot of this viewing with alarm is an irrational Puritan
reaction against the good life. . . . It is not at all a settled matter that
luxury creates softness and decadence. . . ."
Therefore he urged marketers not to get "all excited about the
human consequences of so-called successful marketing." Instead, he
argued, the marketer should tend to his knitting. Society needs always
to be asking itself where it is headed. And someone must think and act
on the questions being raised by the prospect of ever-higher
consumption; but that "someone" should not be the businessman. He
concluded that "cultural, spiritual, social, moral, etc., consequences of
his actions are none of his occupational concern." In truth, he said, "the
businessman exists for only one purpose, to create and deliver value
satisfactions at a profit to himself." He suggested that businessmen
leave soul saving, preserving spiritual values, cultivating human
dignity, and conserving self-respect to others.
Dr. Levitt's elaborate rationalization of nonresponsibility for
marketers obviously touched a very raw nerve. Subsequent issues of
Advertising Age carried pages filled with angry denunciations and
rebuttals by marketers and other readers. An official of the advertising
agency, MacManus, John and Adams, wrote: "The immense benefits of
business to society are obvious. Dr. Levitt's uncalled-for defense is so
weak it is, in effect, damnation, for which the advertising and business
world should not soon forgive him." And the promotion art director of
Architectural Forum wrote: "The businessman's responsibility, whether
moral or material, will always be with him and he cannot be relieved of
it—and neither Mr. Levitt's article nor wishing will make it so."
Now we approach the final—and most perplexing—phase of this
exploration of the pressures toward, and implications of, ever-mounting
consumption in the United States. What, if anything, should be done?
If a projection of present trends seems to confront United States
citizens with an exceedingly unpretty picture for the future, is there any
escape from these pressures that would not disrupt the economy? And if
some disruption is unavoidable in any correction of current trends,
would the disruption be acceptable as an alternative to the present
headlong course? This course appears to be taking the people of the
United States toward more and more force feeding, more and more
manipulation, more and more fast-fading or deteriorating products,
more and more self-indulgence, more and more depletion of
irreplaceable resources.
In view of the sharp acceleration involved in the demand in the
United States and abroad for resources and living space, it seems urgent
that citizens of the United States begin taking a long view of the drift of
their society. When we say that the nation may be feeing a real pinch
for such resources as copper, lead, zinc, and oil within two decades, that
may sound like a deadline that is still far off. After all, the year 1980
puts us close to the time of George Orwell's fictional Big Brother. But
twenty years is no further ahead than Pearl Harbor is behind us. Or
consider that far-distant date of A.D. 2000, when the country's present
population will have doubled if present trends continue. That is no
further ahead than the beginning of the Jazz Age is behind us. Or look a
full century into the future when, if present trends continue, the world
will be approaching exhaustion of most of its presently known vital raw
materials and energy sources and probably will be largely dependent on
ordinary rock, sunlight, air, sea water, and perhaps coal to develop its
living standards. That is only as far ahead as the outbreak of the United
States Civil War is behind us. A century represents less than 2 per cent
of man's brief recorded history.
All this suggests that the people of the United States and elsewhere
begin thinking of the long haul. Otherwise, they and their children face
a rigorous, regimented, and teeming future.
Is it possible that the people of the United States can still work out
for the long run a sane, intelligent, and satisfying way of life while
preserving a reasonably thriving economy?
There is no absolute assurance that they can. But the possibilities
should be explored before it is too late to start. If there are available any
simple solutions to this challenge, the author is unaware of them.
A number of economic thinkers are increasingly aware that not just
the United States economy but the drift of the United States civilization
is involved. Some few economists are becoming oriented as much to the
needs of the consumer as to the better-understood needs of the producer.
An outstanding example of this latter breed of economist is Leland
Gordon of Denison University, author of Economics for Consumers,
who states: "Economic stability and high-level employment are
desirable goals. But the well-being of consumers is a desirable goal,
too."
Let us then look at some suggested courses for the future that seem
to deserve the consideration of the American people. They deal with the
twin challenges of developing more enlightened consumption patterns
while evolving an economy that can thrive reasonably well without
force feeding and, further, can have a reasonable chance of enduring for
the long run.
PART IV
Some Suggested Courses
CHAPTER 21
Restoring Pride in Prudence
"The unorganized consumer must resist blind conformity to the
group and to the commercial persuader. Education is central to his
resistance."—LELAND GORDON, Denison University.
IN EARLIER YEARS, ECONOMISTS PONDERING THE CONTROLS
necessary to keep the seller-buyer relationship in fair balance concluded
that ordinary human prudence would protect the buyer from being
exploited or overwhelmed. Caveat emptor, they intoned.
Letting the buyer beware was thought to be no real problem because
the buyer was assumed to hold the whip hand since the money was in
his pocket. The consumer was assumed to be sovereign. And marketers
and merchandisers still like to flatter the consuming public by referring
to it as "king."
Today, there is less outright hoodwinking of the old-fashioned
variety in the market place. Lately, "fraud" has been the whipping boy
of the Federal Trade Commission and of marketers who want to "clean
up" practices that have proved embarrassing when exposed. Actually,
from the general public's viewpoint, fraud is not the major problem.
Outright fraud has become too dangerous for all but fly-by-night
operators. It is no longer considered to be even sporting. Ethics in the
market place have risen at least in this respect. Further, it should be
stressed that many producers and retailers persist in the old-fashioned
habit of viewing the consumer with respect and strive to the very best of
their ability to serve his best interests.
On the other hand, marketers in general have been subjecting the
consumer to a barrage of selling strategies that has rarely heretofore
been matched in variety, intensity, or ingenuity. Millions of consumers
are manipulated, razzle-dazzled, indoctrinated, mood-conditioned, and
flimflammed. They are conditioned to be discontented with last year's
models, and they are conditioned to accept flimsily built products.
The attitude of all too many marketers was revealed in the January
29, 1960, issue of Printers' Ink—"The Weekly Magazine of Advertising
and Marketing"—when it earnestly reported efforts being made by
marketing researchers to understand how people acquire and retain
information and attitudes. It stated: "Perhaps most important of all, [the
researchers] are edging toward that ultimate question for advertising:
How can the consumer, like Pavlov's dog, be taught the habit of buying
a specific brand?"
If that truly is the "ultimate question" for advertising, then the
industry had better search its soul. And consumers had better take to the
barricades.
One measure of the difficulty that the lone consumer faces today is
the warning made by three psychologists at the University of Michigan.
They stated that "the indiscriminate and uncontrolled application of
psychological principles is increasing at a fearsome rate" in marketing
uses on an unwary public. They suggested that a "trusted scientific
group" be set up to keep an eye on all these free-wheeling applicators.
Another measure of the challenge confronting the lone consumer is the
statement of Colston Warne, president of Consumers Union. He states:
"The consumer is asked to choose wisely under circumstances
which often baffle even the trained technician. He is faced with product
differentiation, brand differentiation, model differentiation, price
differentiation. He is offered bonuses of extraneous products for
purchasing. He is faced with trading stamps, special discounts, and
trade-ins. Products are sold in varying quantities and in containers often
deceptive to the eye."
The consumer also is faced increasingly with buying products of
such complexity in their electronic or chemical composition that an
expert assessment is beyond his capacity. He finds himself choosing on
a superficial basis such as color of the trim or the brand image that has
been etched into his mind by the seller.
In the unequal relationship between marketer and buyer, it should
be added, the federal government—which is supposed to "promote the
general welfare"—has in recent years offered more comfort and aid to
the marketer than to the consumer. It has spent billions of dollars to help
producers with their problems and has a number of cabinet officers to
promote the interests of producers. It has no cabinet officer specifically
charged with protecting the interest of the public in its role as a
consumer.
During the early days of the Eisenhower Administration, the modest
product-testing and consumer activities of the Bureau of Home
Economics (Department of Agriculture) were sharply curtailed. The
Consumers Union protested at the time that compared to the oceans of
aid to retailers, wholesalers, manufacturers, importers, exporters,
bankers, etc., that was flooding from the Government Printing Office,
the publications of the Bureau of Home Economics were a scant trickle
indeed. Appropriations for the Food and Drug Administration were not
permitted to keep pace with the growth in population and the flood of
new products. In the mid-fifties, the Bureau of Standards was ordered to
stop publication of Care and Repair of the Home, which had sold more
than 175,000 copies at sixty cents a copy. The director explained: "We
have no authority to run a consumer advisory service."
The story is much the same with other federal agencies purportedly
dedicated to the public welfare. Members of the Federal Housing
Administration, the Federal Trade Commission, the Federal
Communications Commission, and the Federal Power Commission
have come predominantly from the industry groups whose regulation
was entrusted to them. And for the most part—and at least until very
recently—the agencies have shown far more zeal in promoting the
producers' welfare and refereeing producer quarrels than in protecting
the consumers. Two Federal Communications Commission members
were so deeply involved in fraternizing with the industry they were
supposed to regulate that they were encouraged to resign. A doctor with
the Food and Drug Administration told Senate investigators that when
she sought to require the manufacturer of a new drug to warn against
drug addiction on the label of the product, a high official of the Food
and Drug Administration responded by saying that he did not wish to
have his policy of friendliness with industry interfered with.
In the face of all these pressures, the lone consumer of ordinary
intelligence and impulsiveness is usually no match for the subtle and
massive onslaughts aimed at him. Today, the consumer is far from
sovereign. To restore the consumer to any real sovereignty, there needs
to be a return on a large scale to pride in prudent buying and
informative support for that prudence.
What—if anything—can be done to restore today's consumercitizen to this sovereignty he has lost?
There are a few things that each individual consumer can do—if he
or she is so minded—to regain a posture of self-respect in the shopping
situation. And in doing so, he may well serve as an example to others.
For example: He can demand that he be approached on a rational basis,
and protest when he is not. Usually, when Americans find themselves
the owners of handsome but malfunctioning products, they complain to
their friends rather than to the maker or distributor. A Carnegie Tech
professor has expressed amazement that so few complaints go to a
company that has marketed an indisputable lemon.
A lone consumer may feel helpless in facing up to a giant
corporation with plants in 123 cities. Actually, this lone consumer
should know that this monolith tends to over-react to criticism to its
products. One strong letter, neatly typed, addressed to the president, can
create concern in the executive suite (even though the president himself
is probably spared from seeing the letter). Two letters of protest will
create panic. Three letters of protest will create pandemonium.
Kiwanis International took a salutary step a few months ago when it
established as one of its twenty criteria for good citizenship whether the
member was doing his part in "rebelling against" false and misleading
advertising.
A promising area for citizens to test their claws as self-respecting
consumer-critics is in the area of drugs. As indicated, many doctors by
and large have fallen into the habit—as a result of being cultivated by
hordes of pharmaceutical detail men and by onslaughts of drug
advertising—of using a brand name rather than the scientific name in
writing a prescription. Both meet the government specifications as to
purity and potency and are substantially identical. Drug firms argue that
they individually strive to improve upon the government standards.
(Some famous name brands have been found to be substandard.)
Whether, however, a possible slight improvement is worth the frequent
doubling of cost can be left to the consumer's judgment.
A family with heavy medical bills can save $50 or $100 a year if it
asks its family doctor to use the scientific name in writing prescriptions
except where he may have some strong preference among brands. In
1960, several states began urging doctors to use the scientific rather
than the brand name in prescribing when state funds were involved, as
with welfare patients.
As a longer-range goal the consumer-citizens might work for a more
rational way for dispensing drugs than by hocus-pocus. It is a travesty
of free enterprise when twenty-five companies are issuing essentially
the identical drug under twenty-five different brand names at greatly
varying prices. Word artists invent the brand names, and often try to
make them sound like some other highly successful drug. All this
represents not only economic waste but danger. Doctors are
complaining that disasters can arise in the jungle of nomenclature that is
developing, as a result of a doctor's confusion. In a rational society, I
would think, the medical profession would arrange for a simple way to
get pure, high-quality drugs to the public at a cost not inflated by rivalbrand promotional activities.
The individual consumer can insist that producers who wish to win
his patronage start stressing function over fashion. One does not have to
be a killjoy—such as the technocrat of the thirties—to see that the
emphasis on styling in the United States consumer-goods mart has
exceeded the bounds of rationality. It is one thing to have natural
swings in style in design and quite another to have designers seeking
ways to outmode all the bathroom scales or washing machines in
American homes by mapping style changes.
Industrial designer Henry Dreyfuss points out that American
automobile makers have been so preoccupied with styling in some
recent years that they have forgotten that cars are supposed to be
comfortable to sit in, convenient to operate, safe to take out on the road,
and economical.
The prudent segment of the consuming public should favor those
brave entrepreneurs who have braced themselves against the tide of
styling and have tried to offer to the public products designed for
function rather than style by giving special consideration to their
offerings. American Motors is one producer that deserves special
recognition in this regard because in both its automobiles such as the
Rambler and in its Kelvinator appliances it has made a bold effort to
swear off the annual style change. It is one of the few companies having
heavy durables that have seriously sought to reduce planned
obsolescence.
Another company deserving the consumer's gratitude because of its
considerateness is Polaroid Corporation. A grateful camera owner first
pointed out the Polaroid situation to me. She said that although Polaroid
has produced a number of significant functional improvements over the
years, it has designed virtually all of them so that they will fit on her
original camera bought more than a decade ago. I find that this
represents a deliberate policy on Polaroid's part. Its new wink-light was
made to fit all the old cameras in existence. When Polaroid came up
with a film fifteen times as fast as its then-current films—a film so fast
it could take pictures indoors without a flash bulb—the company gave
to owners of any old cameras desiring to use it free light seals which
would enable the owner of an old camera to use the new improved film.
Polaroid keeps right on issuing its older models. Its very first
camera—the 95—was a brown camera with a conspicuous shutter
faceplate. After twelve years, the 95 is still sold. Furthermore, it looks
no different from the original camera, although dozens of improvements
have quietly been incorporated.
The prudent consumer can also make life more difficult for the
style-obsolescence marketer—and more pleasant for himself—by
buying his new products just before the restyled models are to be
introduced for the "new" year. This is when the dealers are under great
pressure from the manufacturers to unload remaining models of the
current year. Substantial discounts are offered, and many excellent buys
become available. If such prudent shopping becomes the general
pattern, the manufacturers might very quickly lose much of their
fascination with change-for-change sake.
The consumer who would be prudent will insist that manufacturers
show greater responsibility for the satisfactory performance of their
products. In view of the high rate of product breakdown in many lines,
he will read the guarantee with particular interest while shopping,
before making a purchase. Does it cover both parts and service? And
for how long? A washing-machine producer who has enough
confidence in his product to offer a five-year, no-strings-attached
guarantee covering parts and service should quickly win a vast
following of enthusiastic buyers.
This would-be prudent buyer might also give sympathetic attention
to the wares of the producer who offers to help him be his own
repairman, just as Henry Ford I issued his do-it-yourself kits. Many
parts of modern appliances—such as timers—are, of course, too
complicated for home repair. But the Norge Division of the BorgWarner Corporation has launched a campaign to help owners of its
products to make simple repairs, and is designing its products to
simplify such home repair. It might also help in restoring prudence if
across the nation husbands and wives spent a few evenings a year in
adult classes at local schools that are devoted to conveying an
understanding of how to select and maintain various appliances.
The consumer who would be prudent in today's economy will buy
the basic product rather than the one loaded down with accessories—
whether it be a woman's dress, a refrigerator, a washing machine, or an
automobile.
Finally, the consumer should be honest with himself and inquire
whether an ailing product became that way because of his own
carelessness.
In the task of recapturing sovereignty in the sales mart, the
consumer is getting some organized backing, and more might well be
encouraged. Concerted efforts to assist the consumer are still on a
modest scale when compared with the massiveness of the selling
effort—stoked with billions of dollars—on the producers' side.
However, this force for the consumer is growing every month as the
pressures on the consumer have grown, as if expanding to fill a vacuum
in a field of forces.
There are now nonprofit associations of consumers such as the
Council on Consumer Information, currently headquartered at Colorado
State College, Greeley, Colorado. This has only about a thousand
members, but the members are almost all college and high-school
teachers in a position to teach prudence to young people. The council
circulates newsletters and booklets and holds an annual conference. As
the sixties were beginning, a number of annual conferences on
consumer problems sprang up in the United States. They were
sponsored by colleges, state governments, and consumer-testing
organizations.
It is these consumer-testing organizations that undoubtedly have the
greatest impact as countervailing forces. There are two principal ones in
the United States. One is Consumers' Research, Inc., of Washington,
New Jersey, which publishes monthly the nonprofit Consumer Bulletin,
with a circulation of more than 100,000. More famous and influential is
the fast-growing, nonprofit Consumers Union with headquarters in an
imposing complex of old red-brick buildings at 256 Washington Street
in Mount Vernon, New York. It is the largest consumer-testing
organization in the world. Consumer Reports, its principal publication,
has grown from a circulation of less than 75,000 at the end of World
War II to more than 800,000 today.
Consumers Union has a staff of more than 150 persons, including a
number of engineers, chemists, physicists, and several dozen testing
technicians. Its board of directors is composed primarily of scientists
and educators. Consumers Union has shoppers in sixty-three cities who
buy products to be tested on the regular market and pay the usual retail
price. It never accepts free samples from manufacturers.
During a stroll through the rooms of Consumers Union's seven
testing divisions (appliances, audio, automotive, chemistry, electronics,
textiles, and special projects), you may see dozens of cake mixers
whirring away, stirring bowls filled with a mixture of oil and sawdust.
That makes a relatively heavy load. Or you will see dozens of women
receiving home permanents. Each half of a woman's head gets a
different preparation for comparative purposes. "Afterward," my guide
Morris Kaplan, Consumer Union's technical director, explained, "we
give them all a good permanent and rectify any damage done."
In another room you may see people soiling dishes with a
standardized mixture of tomato paste, spaghetti, spinach, and eggs.
After the soiling the dishes are aged for a set period before being placed
in dishwashers to see how well the various machines rise to the
challenge of removing the food.
You see refrigerators being tested in a controlled temperature room
that cost $50,000 to build. And you hear record players being tested in a
room so fully soundproof that you can hear a heart beating. Much of the
automobile testing is done on a very rough, twisting course near New
Haven, Connecticut, and on a sports-car racing track.
In the early days of Consumers Union, manufacturers and
advertising agencies were distinctly hostile to its testing activities.
Today, the hostility has virtually disappeared. Mr. Kaplan states: "Most
manufacturers bend over backward to co-operate with us." They know
from their dealers that a favorable or unfavorable report from
Consumers Union can make their selling task easier or harder. There
have been a number of instances in the past few years of manufacturers
hastening to change a design when Consumers Union reported the
product "Not Acceptable" because of shock hazard or other weakness.
Often the manufacturers themselves inform Consumers Union that the
objectionable feature has been corrected and ask for a retest. Consumers
Union does so at the first opportunity.
This testing organization derives its financial support entirely from
the sale of its publications. In order not to affect his impartiality, no
employee may have any direct connection with any commercial firm.
Consumers Union forbids the use of its product ratings in advertising or
for any other commercial purpose. In its twenty-four years of existence,
no suit has ever been successfully sustained against Consumers Union
for publishing its often unflattering findings.
One of the major needs of consumers today is guidance on the
durability of products. Consumers Union feels this is still an area where
advances in testing must be made. For many products, durability is one
of the most difficult characteristics to assess. How can you subject a
new refrigerator to a "lifetime" test? It can be done on an accelerated
basis—including the door slamming—but it is costly and, of course, the
refrigerators tested are a dead loss at the end and cannot be resold.
Recently, Consumers Union completed an accelerated life test on
automobile tires at a cost of $50,000. As it gains in circulation and thus
resources, it can increase its testing for durability.
In seeking to assess motorcars for their durability, Consumers
Union has mostly used an indirect approach. It conducts an annual
survey among thousands of subscribers who are owners of motorcars.
Each owner states the make and year of his motorcar and then lists the
major repairs that have been necessary during the year. The results
show that two of the best cars produced in the years 1954 through 1959
in terms of trouble-free performance were the 1955 Oldsmobile and the
1958 Rambler. Among the most troublesome American motorcars
reported for this period were the 1958 Mercury, the 1958 Lincoln, and
the 1957 Buick.1
One aspect of its service that concerns Consumers Union as a
shortcoming is that most of the readers of its Consumer Reports are the
kind of people who need it least. It has appealed most to those people
who were prudent to start with: males of relatively high intelligence in
business or the professions. Currently, Consumer Reports is seeking to
expand its readership among women—who make most of the family
purchasing decisions—and among the lower-income groups who,
though they need to stretch their dollars further, tend to be more
flamboyant, impulsive, and unthinking in their buying habits than
people with higher incomes. They are the ones most likely to be
exploited, the most likely to have the expensive patent medicines in
their bathroom, and the 36 per cent interest installment debts.
Another nonprofit advisory firm of considerable indirect interest to
consumers is the Drug and Therapeutic Information, Inc., in New York
City. It is staffed by distinguished physicians who became weary of
trying to wade through—and make sense out of—the thousands of
brochures from drug houses hailing their new brands. These doctors
have begun publishing for doctors a newsletter called Medical Letter on
Drugs and Therapeutics. It carries no advertising and endeavors to shed
light on pharmaceutical claims. The letter already has more than ten
thousand doctors on its subscription list. The chief of its advisory board
is the director of Clinical Pharmacology at Johns Hopkins Medical
School.
The anxiety that this Medical Letter created among the drug houses
is indicated by the fact that one drug house published a full-page
denunciation of the Medical Letter in its magazine for doctors and then
refused to publish the Medical Letter's reply—even in paid advertising
space. And the medical list house that had been addressing the Medical
Letter's mail to doctors suddenly withdrew its list.
Belatedly some government groups are being mobilized to assist the
bedazzled lone consumer.
A pioneering move was made by New York's former Governor
Averell Harriman when he set up a Consumer Counsel attached to his
office. The counsel, Dr. Persia Campbell, sought to advance and protect
consumers' interests on every front and at every level of the state
government. She was so successful that the idea of a special counsel or
department of consumer protection has spread to California and
Massachusetts, and at this writing is being proposed by the governors of
Michigan and Minnesota. The California Office of Consumer Counsel
has become a permanent part of the state government. In proposing this
office to the legislature, Governor Brown said: "We consumers have
little defense against highly organized special interests." Meanwhile,
there was an overturn of the governorship in Albany. The new Governor
Nelson Rockefeller disbanded the temporary office of Consumer
Counsel, and remnants of the program went under the state's
Department of Commerce. This move, Dr. Campbell told me, "was
worse than abolishing the whole program, since it made the consumer
interest captive to business policy."
In Washington, twenty-four senators headed by Estes Kefauver
began promoting a bill to set up in the federal government a Department
of Consumers headed by an officer with cabinet rank. It would promote
the interests of consumers at all levels and in battles before federal
regulatory agencies that are now largely fought out by lobbyists of the
various organized commercial groups. This department would provide a
more congenial consumer-oriented home for such agencies as the
Federal Food and Drug Administration, the Bureau of Standards, and
the Bureau of Home Economics. A wide variety of Administration
spokesmen have opposed the creation of such a Department of
Consumers on the ground that it is not necessary. They say the work is
already being done.
Norway, incidentally, has such a cabinet post. The minister, a
woman, has as much status as the minister of agriculture or commerce.
As a member of parliament stated it, one function of the ministry is to
encourage Norwegian consumers to return "to their rightful role—that
of being appropriate hell-raisers concerning the prices and quality of
goods."
Meanwhile, so many United States congressmen have been starting
to promote measures affecting buyer-seller relations that marketers are
apprehensive. One congressman, John Blatnik, has been pressing the
United States Public Health Office and the United States Office of
Education to offer to children educational materials on the health hazard
of cigarette smoking to offset partially all the appeals reaching them in
cigarette advertisements.
All in all, signs are appearing that the consumer may soon be started
on a swing that will eventually return him to a position approaching
equality in the buyer-seller relationship.
CHAPTER 22
Restoring Pride in Qualify
"I imagine the fabric mills are going to do a lot of squirming before
they agree to anything resembling a set of rules about how good their
products have to be."—Furniture manufacturer quoted in Retailing
Daily. 1
THE MANUFACTURER CITED ABOVE EXPLAINED THAT WHILE THE MILLS
had been doing a fine job on "styling," they had not been paying
"sufficient attention to durability and quality." It might be added as a
postscript that the upholstery-fabric manufacturers succeeded in getting
their product excluded from the provisions of the Textile Fabric
Products Identification Act, which went into effect in 1960. They
registered opposition that in some instances was vehement.
This manufacturer's indictment regarding quality could apply
equally appropriately to a number of fields producing goods for
consumers. Some producers still struggle stubbornly to produce the very
highest-quality product possible. Many more, as noted, feel they can
build a greater over-all volume if their goods don't last too long. Still
others would like to strive for quality, but often feel they do not dare to
because their corner-cutting competitors might push them to the wall by
using the savings to throw more money into promotional display and
advertising that would catch the public's attention.
From both the viewpoint of the consumer and the conscientious
producer, it seems highly desirable that the United States move toward a
return to a passion for quality on the part of each producer of goods.
Ideally, he should develop this resolution as a part of his quest for life
satisfaction and feel dissatisfied with himself until he achieves this
quality.
We must concede that anyone with such resolution must expect to
face discouragement as long as the market place remains as presently
motivated and operated. In the jungle of today's market a host of
products appear and disappear each year. In earlier decades product
qualities were more widely known.
How can a modern consumer looking at an appliance judge factors
he cannot see, such as insulation, durability of parts, electrical hazard,
and rust resistance of finishes?
How can he know—as I discovered in a most exasperating way—
that the handles of one brand of streamlined luggage nationally
advertised for its ruggedness would come off within a week? In my case
this happened with not one but two of the bags.
How can the modern consumer choose plywood furniture
intelligently—in the absence of a wood-labeling law—when wood
labeled "driftwood walnut" or "silver oak" contains neither walnut nor
oak?
How can the consumer choose carpets intelligently when carpet
dealers themselves have lamented that they are so confused by various
exaggerated claims for fabrics that they would be grateful to have some
honest appraisal of the performance that might be expected. They have
admitted—among themselves—that they've often been selling "a blind
item."
In such confusing situations it would help both the consumer and
the conscientious producer if agreed standards—or yardsticks—of
quality were available to assist the consumer in making a choice.
Today, there would seem to be an urgent need for quality standards—
and yet in the consumer field they are almost nonexistent. (Milk and
bedsheets are two of the exceptions.) Morris Kaplan, technical director
of Consumers Union, says: "There are almost no uniform standards on
consumer goods." And a leading authority on standards, Jessie V.
Coles, chairman of the Department of Home Economics at the
University of California, has stated: "Efforts have been made from time
to time to set up national standards for various kinds of consumer
goods. . . . Except for those enforced by federal law, relatively few
standards are in existence." 2
Miss Coles blames this partly on the fact that consumers have not
demanded or understood the need for standards. But also, she said, there
was the factor of "resistance of producers."
Why do the producers resist? In theory they should be dedicated
advocates of quality standards because they insist on using them every
day in buying their materials. They buy on the basis of standards or
specifications. No motorcar manufacturer, for example, would dream of
buying its steel on the basis of a double-page advertising spread in a
periodical. It buys steel on the basis of specification numbers
established by the Society of Automotive Engineers. (But even the
motorcar industry could have done a great deal more than it has to
standardize basic components throughout the industry.) Large
institutional buyers such as hotels, hospitals, universities, and railroads
buy their textile supplies on the basis of established performance
criteria.
Yet producers have tended to react as if faced with ruin when
suggestions have been advanced that comparable quality standards be
set up to guide them and their consumer-customers.
Consider the frozen-food makers. At their own trade meetings they
have heard charges that they "were getting away with murder" in the
matter of quality of product. Frozen orange juice has declined in quality
since first introduced. A dozen years ago, frozen orange juice tasted
very much like freshly squeezed orange juice. But over the years the
producers have been squeezing the fruit harder and harder, and getting
more and more pectin into the product. Yet Eastern frozen-food
producers registered almost unanimous opposition to a proposal for
compulsory grading.
Or consider the shoe manufacturers. In the past decade, there has
been a growth in the use of paper fiber as a substitute for leather in
making parts of children's shoes. The paper fiber can be a mean
deception because it is likely to reveal itself only when the child
wearing such shoes gets his feet wet. Yet when Congressman Charles
Porter (D., Ore.) proposed a shoe-labeling act, thousands of people in
the shoe industry opposed it.
What is behind the hostility of most producers to publicized quality
standards for their particular products? For the record, they usually
claim that quality standards would be expensive to establish, or
bothersome, or somehow interfere with their present flexibility in
shifting designs or merchandising appeals. In addition, however, there
seem to be at least five other reasons—difficult to discuss in public—
why talk of quality standards scares many producers:
Many producers are privately convinced that they can sell more
products on the basis of gimmicks, special features, impulse, and
innovation than on the basis of quality. Thus they are likely to feel that
posted standards of quality might bring an intelligence and selectivity to
the purchasing counter that would undermine a less rational approach.
Producers generally prefer to let the public make its choice on the
basis of brand image and, to a less extent, price rather than posted
quality. In this way each brand may be presented as possessing uniquely
mysterious or magical powers or a unique "personality" that helps
establish "differentiation" from competing products. And most
assuredly—in the absence of quality standards—each brand can be
presented to the public as the acme of quality and trustworthiness. Some
brands may be close to the acme of quality, but the likelihood is just as
great that they are not.
A posting of quality standards makes it more difficult, obviously,
for a retailer to sell merchandise that deserves no higher than a
mediocre quality rating, unless it is modestly priced.
In many cases the quality involved does not warrant the high prices
charged. Products sold for their snob appeal often seem overpriced on
the basis of any reasonable, objective quality analysis. And occasionally
the producer may vary the quality of a particular brand in different
geographical areas depending on the severity of his competition. Home
economist Jessie V. Coles tells of a case in which a meat packer put his
brand image on a lower quality of beef in the downstate Illinois market
than on the meat sold in Chicago because he faced less rugged
competition downstate.
And, finally, the big producers tend to be cool to any kind of grade
labeling because such certifying of quality reduces their advantages
over the small producer. When competition must be conducted
primarily on the basis of the brand image, as it is conducted today, the
small producer is at an enormous disadvantage even if his product is as
good as the large producer's—or better. Today, just building a better
mousetrap is not enough. You have got to launch it. It often costs tens
of millions of dollars to launch a new product successfully on a national
basis, etch an image of it in the public's mind, and commandeer good
exposure space on the nation's store shelves. A former chairman of
General Electric's finance committee was quoted as criticizing the high
prices that the major companies were charging for their appliances. He
charged that General Electric, Westinghouse, and RCA Whirlpool
eventually could kill off competitors through the use of advertising
unless the competitors merged into larger units.3
In contrast, if you have some form of grade labeling, the consumer
can choose on the basis of assured quality rather than on brand image.
This permits the small producer to compete with the large one on the
more equal grounds of quality offered per dollar. Mildred Brady of
Consumers Union pointed out the opportunities that open up to the
small producer when quality standards are posted by citing the recent
experience of meat packers on the West Coast. Government grade
labeling of meat was started there after World War II. Within a decade
the small packers had captured three quarters of the market. Recently,
several of the big national meat packers have been campaigning to
eliminate this grade labeling of meat.
Some very small steps have been made in establishing quality
indicators to help guide the bewildered consumer. Congress has now
passed laws requiring producers of wool, fur, and some textile products
to specify contents on the labels. A mere listing of ingredients, however,
is no assurance of high quality. How the ingredients are put together
may be just as crucial to quality. Furthermore, a listing of the generic
(chemical) names of fibers used in the new "miracle" fabrics is not
particularly illuminating to a beleaguered consumer.
There are also a number of organizations that issue "seals"
indicating that the products carrying the seal meet at least certain
minimum specifications. There is the "UL" seal for much of the
electrical equipment sold in the United States to indicate that the
National Board of Fire Underwriters considers the equipment
nonhazardous. And a similar "AGA" label exists for gas appliances. A
few general magazines have testing centers and issue seals on products
that have been approved after testing or use. These seals sometimes
serve a second purpose of helping promote their magazine in the
business world; but the seals do offer assurance that the testers found
the products meet an acceptable quality.
Another possible approach is grade labeling, and this would be
extremely helpful to consumers. Ideally, the grade labeling should be
done by a universally recognized certifying agency. The grades—say A,
B, and C or X, Y, and Z—would be based not on ingredients alone as in
usual labeling but rather on an over-all rating of quality. This could be
arrived at as a total score based on a number of characteristics most
crucial to establishing quality in the performance of that kind of
product. Mail-order houses, although they do their own certifying,
attempt such a grading. Sears, Roebuck, for example, offers in its
catalogue three grades of a certain line of stoves: "Good," "Better," and
"Our Best." Further, it itemizes under the picture each of the features
that helped establish its grade.
In theory an ideal certifying agency is already at hand to certify
products for at least a minimum quality seal. That is the American
Standards Association, set up forty years ago. It helped establish safety
glass for motorcars and protective clothing during World War II.
However, it offers little hope of being able to do a labeling or certifying
job on any large scale. Its weakness from the consumer's standpoint is
that it is made up primarily of industry members and it approves
standards only when they have been unanimously accepted by the
leading groups involved. No matter how minimal are the standards
proposed, almost always there is some manufacturer who holds out and
prevents its adoption. Furthermore, the American Standards Association
has little power to enforce even those standards for an American
Standards Association mark that its members can agree upon.
The British have progressed much further than we in setting up and
enforcing meaningful standards for consumer products. They have their
nonprofit British Standards Institution supported in part by industry
contributions, in part by government funds, and in part from the sale of
its publications. It might serve as a model for the United States.
British Standards Institution standards are hammered out by
representatives of industry, government, and the consuming public,
represented by an advisory council of consumers. Furthermore, for
several dozen types of consumer goods it now authorizes producers of
"sound" consumer goods to display the British Standards Institution's
"Kitemark" on each article offered for sale. The Kitemark—a heart with
an S inside it—now appears on such products as bedding, electric
blankets, pressure cookers, bedsprings, and some furniture, if the
products come up to British Standards Institution standards.
The use of this Kitemark is rigorously policed. And the British
Standards Institution is experimenting with the idea of establishing
grades of quality within the "sound" products approved for a Kitemark
to meet the needs of those who want more than basic quality.
Apparently this would be along the line of Sears, Roebuck's "Good,"
"Better," "Our Best." The British Standards Institution also issues a
detailed guide on product quality, The Shopper's Guide, a small
publication comparable to the Consumer Reports printed in the United
States.
An example of the British Standards Institution approach is the test
it conducted on "fireside chairs" before it would issue a Kitemark. More
than one hundred firms have earned the mark. For fireside chairs, what
does the Kitemark offer in the way of assurance? Here is an indication,
from a British Standards Institution publication:
"In a word it means that the chair is sturdy. That the frame is made
of properly dried timber, free of bad knots and splits, and of
wormwood. That any veneers are properly applied and exterior surfaces
well finished. Springs, fillings, and fabrics are also vetted. Kitemarked
chairs have to go through endurance tests without flagging. For
example, a 16-stone weight [more than 200 pounds] is thrust 20 times a
minute—600 times in all—on back, seat, and arms. Joints must stay
rigid, upholstery firm and shapely, springs as resilient as at the
beginning."
It would be interesting to speculate how some of the flimsy
furniture produced and widely sold in the United States would stand up
under such a pounding.
At a time when United States trade papers were lamenting the
decline in quality of many American-made products, an official of the
British Standards Institution told me matter-of-factly, "The British are
upgrading quality all the time." He added that in Britain companies
selling raw materials now often sell their products only to
manufacturers who have earned the Kitemark.
Canada, too, has gone considerably further than the United States in
establishing and enforcing quality standards. It has grade labeling of
canned fruits, vegetables, eggs, poultry, and other products. When
nationally advertised brands of canned fruits and vegetables produced in
the United States are marketed in Canada, they carry grade labels on
them. It might also be noted that the standards set by the Canadian
Standards Association for acceptable electric light fixtures are so high
that some products widely sold in the United States are turned back at
the border as inferior.
Is it unreasonable for citizens of the United States of America—the
world's most productive society—to expect that as an ideal its products
be designed from the consumer's point of view rather than the seller's?
Is it unreasonable for its citizens to want to be able to choose products
on the basis of posted assurances of quality rather than on the basis of a
brand image learned by word of mouth or by assurances from television
announcers?
Industry itself, it should be noted, is showing new interest in quality
standards. When laments about the lack of standards in the rug field
were reaching the scandalous stage, many of the large companies
making "miracle" fiber rugs such as du Pont, Chemstrand, Celanese,
Allied Chemical, and American Viscose instituted—or had already
instituted—quality-standard programs on an individual basis. This was
heartening, but did little to reduce the confusion of the consumer. Their
various standards would have to be accepted on faith. The consumer
needs uniform and readily comprehensible standards that will be
respected and policed.
Letters from individual consumers to their congressmen might well
hasten the day when an agency—official or unofficial—is somehow
established along British Standards Institution lines, competent to
establish and enforce quality standards when requested in the United
States. Today, congressmen are becoming more aware of the problems
of consumers than at any time in recent decades. Sales Management
expressed anxiety about this new interest in helping the consumer. It
said, "the general attitude of today's law-makers is seriously disturbing
to many Washington representatives of big-company marketing
executives. . . . The trend is alarming." A few thousand letters to
congressmen probably would not produce any laws establishing
machinery to set quality standards, but they would quite probably worry
industry groups to the point where they would flock to the flag of an
unofficial standards-setting agency in order to head off federal action.
And while the word "standards" still makes many manufacturers
uneasy, there is a distinct trend toward winning good will of consumers
by getting to a higher level of quality than has recently prevailed.
The editor of Printers' Ink admonished marketers that they probably
ought to start giving more attention to product quality "since it is the
basis of repeat sales."
It was during 1960 that a number of appliance companies
announced they were stepping up the "torture testing" of their products.
Maytag, which for years had given durability a higher priority than
stylishness, began doubling the number of days it subjected prototype
washer-driers to constant operation. Under the new schedule the
washer-drier was expected to run 250 days—or the equivalent of ten
years' use in the average home. Maytag also reduced the number of
parts in its automatic washer and increased the warranty on washer
transmissions up to five years. Only a few years ago, the warranty had
been one year.
Motorola began guaranteeing parts on its television and radio sets
for a year. Earlier, the warranty period had been the usual ninety days.
Hotpoint, which had so much grief with defective laundry equipment in
the 1955-57 models, by 1960 had quadrupled its investment in torture
testing, and was subjecting its prototypes to a one-thousand-hour run
with unusually heavy ten-pound loads.
All this was a trend to be encouraged.
In these past two chapters we have explored the possibility of
restoring a larger element of sanity and mutual respect to the market
place. But can the United States with its ever-expanding productivity
and output afford the luxury of sanity and mutual respect? Certainly it is
worth a try. Sooner or later the nation must learn to live within its
means and pace itself for the long run. And the later that fact is learned,
the fewer and more unattractive will be the remaining options.
CHAPTER 23
Respecting the Eternal
Balance
"The Western wilds, from the Alleghenies to the Pacific, constituted
the richest free gift that was ever spread out before civilized man. . . .
Never again can such an opportunity come to the sons of men."—
FREDERICK JACKSON TURNER
TWO RIVAL FORMULAS—BOTH SUPPOSEDLY MAGICAL—ARE BEING
pointed out as the roads to a prosperous future. Together, they pretty
much dominate speculation about the economic future of the United
States of America.
On the one hand, the leading thinkers of business-Repub-licanconservative coloration argue that "population growth" will provide the
golden pathway that will keep the economy humming for years to come
by providing ever-more customers. And on the other, many people
including the leading thinkers of liberal-Democratic-labor coloration
have been insistently calling for faster "economic growth" to keep
things humming. More money should be poured into the economy in the
form of either private or public spending to double the annual rate of
growth. This is seen as the only way to eliminate the danger of
widespread unemployment created by the relentless rise in man-hour
output in the nation's automated offices and factories.
Both of these paths to sustained prosperity might work for a few
years. And some form of one of them may be inevitable. But both can
be dangerously shortsighted, and should be very carefully explored
before they are embraced. Both promise to increase the drain on the
nation's already overstrained resources. Both are expedients at best.
Both should be assessed in terms of at least the medium-long haul of the
nation.
All enduring societies—human or animal—have had to achieve a
tolerable balance between their population and their supporting
environment, including resources. As indicated, a serious imbalance in
the resources-population picture has been developing in the United
States, while its people gaily step up their consumption.
In 1959, a design engineer from Sunland, California, expressed
dismay at the waste of resources produced by American motorcar
design. He charged in Product Engineering:
"I think the current auto design trend indicates a moral decay in
America that is most alarming. When such a large share of the national
income is squandered on useless glass, fins, overhang, etc., which
require excess horsepower and attendant wasted fuels, then it is about
time the federal government stepped in and placed a tax on auto body
weight and horsepower." Later he added, "If an automobile requires
over 100 horsepower, it is too damned big and wasteful." At this
writing, about three quarters of all motorcars being made in Detroit are
still "too damned big and wasteful" by the engineer's estimate.
It seems urgent that someone in authority in the nation begin
looking a half century ahead in appraising the nation's available material
resources and energy and start channeling the use of both accordingly.
Far more can be done than is being done to reclaim scrap, to develop
substitutes (especially substitutes that do not require an enormous
energy output to produce), to reduce waste in both the mining and use
of resources, and in finding outlets for the nation's need for economic
activity that are sparing of the resources in short domestic supply. The
industry making paper and cardboard products is one of the industrial
groups starting to make extensive reuse of waste. According to one
industry official, half of all paper products can now be made—and often
are made—with reclaimed paper products that have been discarded.
More than a fourth of all paper produced in 1959 was made from nine
million tons of waste paper reused.
The last over-all look at the United States resource position
occurred nearly a decade ago. And that one—by President Truman's
Materials Resources Commission—was mainly preoccupied with
defense requirements. Certain specific aspects of the United States
position have recently been examined by an organization called
Resources for the Future (Washington, D.C.), financed by the Ford
Foundation. In 1960, after a year of delay, President Eisenhower named
a Commission on National Goals that is to begin looking five to ten
years ahead. It is still too early to report whether it will satisfy itself by
calling for "growth," or will seriously seek to face up to the threat posed
by shrinking resources and swelling population. Thirteen months were
consumed in organizing the commission. Difficulty was encountered in
obtaining private financing because, according to one news report, Mr.
Eisenhower's aide "was unable to supply a prospectus that satisfied the
foundations on what the commission was expected to do." In calling for
his five-to-ten-year goals, President Eisenhower said the goals must
"inspire every citizen to climb always toward mounting levels of moral,
intellectual, and material strength."
Perhaps it is only natural that a people who have been so long
overblessed with an abundance of materials and energy continue to
squander them and think in terms of ever-mounting "strength" until a
traumatic event abruptly forces them to realize that conditions now call
for a more prudent and ingenious use of muscles and energy.
This point was eloquently made in early 1959 in The New Yorker
magazine in a description of the philosophy of a cunning old-time
Boston boxer identified as Eddie Shevlin. Shevlin's Law was that "you
can't learn anything until you're tired." This law was explained to the
editors in these terms: "A young fella bursting with energy he thinks is
surplus won't bother to learn economy of motion; he won't learn not to
make a move without possibilities, and not to take extra steps." Then
the informant made this parallel: "Take a country hopped up with what
it thinks is surplus productive capacity, or resources. It jumps around,
bounding off the ropes when it doesn't have to . . . until the going is
hard—a depression say or a war that begins badly. Then it starts to want
to learn how to take care of itself."
It may well be that a majority of the citizens of the United States
will become convinced of the need or wisdom of reducing their
wastefulness of resources before a majority of producers preoccupied
with sales figures reach the same conviction. In that case, the citizenconsumers might wish to prod the producers by modifying their
spending patterns.
They might, for example, embrace enthusiastically the new idea
being tried in several cities of renting their cars, appliances, and home
furnishings—with trouble-free service guaranteed as a part of the deal.
This would be somewhat more expensive than buying the products and
would remove whatever possibility still existed to feel pride in
ownership of a product. But it would strike a solid blow against the
whole concept of planned obsolescence. If a producer knew he was
making products for a rental market rather than for retail sale, he would
instantly become deeply concerned about increasing the product's
durability, especially if he was doing the renting or his dealers were. He
would become obsessed with the idea of simple design to cut down his
servicing costs. And he would seek and use his influence in the trade to
promote a design that would still seem appropriate over a period of
years.
By 1960, many business executives and engineers were feeling
uneasy about their role in encouraging or tolerating wasteful practices,
including the making of shoddy products. The chairman of one of the
nation's largest organizations of advertisers asserted: "The Great
American Ailment is manifest on all sides by a deepening shade in our
ethics . . . a sloppiness in our services, a mediocrity in our manufacturer,
and a growing distrust and even anger in the public mind."
Many executives and engineers specifically felt uneasy about their
role in promoting planned obsolescence. In fact, this uneasiness became
so widespread that other executives urged them not to be hasty in trying
to shift away from some form of obsolescence planning. On March 24,
1960, the board chairman of Whirlpool Corporation, Elisha Gray, II,
delivered a speech to the engineers of the American Home Laundry
Manufacturers' Association technical conference that was most
forthright. In it he stated:
"An engineer's principal purpose as an engineer is to create
obsolescence. Any attempts by various people to toady up to the public
by saying they are against planned obsolescence is so much commercial
demagogy. To pose as a protector of the public has become a
fashionable pastime." He continued that if engineers and other
professional people had not created "obsolescence at a tremendous
rate," Americans would not be as prosperous, well fed, and long-living
as they are. In his talk he appeared to be referring to both planned
obsolescence of desirability and planned obsolescence of function (or
basic product improvement). He said the first—style change—can be
used to dramatize the second. Also he referred to the need of planned
obsolescence "to meet the marketing moves of your competitors" and to
the chronic need for fresh merchandise to stimulate sales. It is expecting
a great deal of a salesman, he said, "to greet each new customer with a
high sense of eagerness and excitement about his product if you don't
give it a face lift occasionally." He added that advertising men and
sales-promotion men need something new and fresh because such
"creative people feed upon change."
Business writers at about the same time were pointing out that the
controversy over planned obsolescence was important because the issue
affects the very basis of private capitalism and free enterprise, since the
American system is geared so importantly to consumer desires.
But still there was widespread uneasiness among businessmen about
the philosophy behind much of the planned obsolescence going on.
They might not feel guilty enough to forswear using the strategy
themselves, but they felt that others should use it sparingly. They began
wishing there were a less worrisome way to accomplish the same result
in sales.
The Harvard Business Review asked several thousand business
executives how they felt about planned obsolescence.1 More than three
thousand responded. The editors of the review concluded from the
responses that "the subject was very touchy indeed." The survey
disclosed a vast amount of uneasiness about the techniques being used
nowadays to move goods. In fact, "the majority of American business
executives feel that for the long-run benefit of the United States too
large a part of our present economy is based on superficial product
obsolescence: the ratio was two to one."
One third of the executives agreed that their own companies were
making "periodic" model or style changes. The head of Westinghouse
Electric Corporation was reported feeling that both styling and
functionalism were needed to do a good selling job. As for appliances,
he explained: "For appliances in which women play a large part in the
purchasing decision, if you took the styling element out, sales would
dry up."
Others were disturbed by even being asked to comment on planned
obsolescence. They "seemed to feel obsolescence was such a
fundamental part of our economy that it should not be tampered with."
The editors concluded that "there is general concern and interest in
looking for and considering alternative means for maintaining consumer
expenditures." Uneasy feelings had evidently still not pushed the
executives to the point where they were certain they would be willing to
stop using such techniques if that meant they had to be satisfied with a
lower level of sales.
In June, 1960, Advertising Age editorially took note of the
"increasing attack" on the "obsolescence factor," which it called "one of
the great developments of American marketing." (It seemed to be
referring, primarily at least, to the annual model change.) At any rate, it
said: "We doubt that it will be abandoned, in the automotive field or
elsewhere, but it is interesting to see it being questioned more and more
frequently."
The consuming public had considerable grounds for uneasiness
because of its own habit of throwing away functioning products or
easily repairable products when new models were desired. Community
officials might profitably backstop the citizens by starting salvage
campaigns at the town dumps.
So much for the waste of the nation's resources. We might look now
at the other side of the resources-population balance. To set the mood,
we might note the warning of Dr. John Rock, Harvard's professor
emeritus of gynecology, that unless the world curbs its proliferation of
human beings within the next few decades, "hungry and crowded
people will rise in bestial strife." This is perhaps too Malthusian a view
to win much contemporary support, but certainly the current population
explosion in the United States and abroad does raise disagreeable
prospects for the future even of Americans, at least in terms of probable
impact on style of life and individual dignity and freedom.
While this problem of the population explosion is characteristically
seen in the United States as a foreign problem, a few businessmen are
showing signs of uneasiness about their own growing reliance upon an
exploding population in the United States. One of the regular admancolumnists for Advertising Age, E. B. Weiss, who is something of a
maverick, commented a few years ago, when the golden opportunities
of population growth were first being discovered:
"Ever since I've been regaled with the current multitude of
wonderful forecasts of a prosperous future sparked by a remarkable
growth of our population I have wondered about the magical powers of
a large population automatically to assure eternal prosperity—at
successively higher peaks. . . . The most populous regions of this mortal
coil tend to be the most poverty-stricken."
And as the sixties were about to begin, a writer for The Wall Street
Journal conceded: "This increase in the number of Americans . . . holds
the prospect' of an expanding economy. But it also may bring new
strains on roads, schools, and water supplies, to mention just a few
items."
If the United States is to attain a tolerable balance for the long run
between resources and population, it must stop glorifying a prosperous
future based on bouncing babies, which has the effect of encouraging
propagation. Curbing a people's procreation habits admittedly is an
enormously complex matter. Joseph Wood Krutch offers the opinion
that the impulse to multiply as rapidly and as profusely as possible is
built into the living organism. Still, with the spectacular advances being
made to prolong life, some curbing of the initiation of life seems
imperative. Arnold Toynbee's view in this connection seems
unassailable. He argues: "To let nature take her extravagant course in
the reproduction of the human race may have made sense in an age in
which we were also letting her take her course in decimating mankind
by the casualties of war, pestilence and famine. Being human, we have
at last revolted against that senseless waste. . . . But when once man has
begun to interfere with nature, he cannot afford to stop halfway. We
cannot, with impunity, cut down the death rate and at the same time
allow the birthrate to go on taking nature's course."
Japan is one nation that has in recent years taken drastic and
spectacular action to strike an equilibrium between its births and deaths.
And in this action, according to the Population Reference Bureau, it has
been the people themselves who have led the way in implementing the
government policy of legalized abortion and birth control. Japanese
males do not react favorably to the idea of using contraceptives, so that
there is a heavy reliance on abortion whenever a wife finds herself
pregnant against the wishes of herself and her husband.
In modern-day Japan there are more abortions than births. One man
who has exhaustively investigated the Japanese situation finds that
abortion there has become simple, inexpensive, and safe. He explained
to me: "The doctor scrapes the wife's uterus, gives her a shot of
penicillin, sends her home. It costs about five dollars. Largely as a
result, the Japanese people have absolutely pulled it off. They have cut
their birth rate in half within a decade. In a few more years their
population should stabilize."
Advances being made in the development of pills that inhibit
fertility can make birth control far more easily achievable than by the
Japanese method, but the pills are still fairly expensive (ten dollars a
month). Even when the cost comes down, however, will the American
people be in a mood to start reducing the growing gap between their
birth rate and their death rate? Possibly they will, as the discomforts of
crowding become more oppressive. At least the moral objections are
being softened. A succession of Protestant church bodies—including
United Presbyterians, Methodist, Congregational Christian, United and
Augustana Lutheran, and Unitarian—have sanctioned birth control. The
Roman Catholic Church officially opposes artificial means of birth
control by individuals. And Pope John XXIII made a plea for large
families as recently as the spring of 1960. But the church does not
oppose "population control." And there is some indication that Catholic
leaders may not find some kinds of pill-taking as objectionable as the
use of physical means of intervention. Some Catholic leaders make a
distinction between pills that would prevent ovulation and those that
help regulate ovulation. The latter, they indicate, might well be
acceptable and would help control the size of the family by making the
rhythm more exact. As for Catholic laymen, a survey of wives by the
Survey Research Center of the University of Michigan indicates that
most individual Catholics favor individual family limitation under
certain circumstances, and a third of them approve family limitation
without any qualification. The National Catholic Family Life
Conference meeting in San Antonio in 1960 heard an "alarming" report
of some studies showing that Catholic "married couples are using
contraceptive birth control in about the same measure as nonCatholics."
A Fordham University (Catholic) professor of philosophy, Dr.
Dietrich von Hildebrand, agreed in early 1960 that overpopulation
might someday force on Roman Catholics a moral duty to limit their
families. Further, he stated that the sexual act has values for the family
beyond procreation. He still felt—as the Catholic Church does—that
any individual interference with procreation should be by the natural or
rhythm method of continence during the wife's fertility cycle. (The
World Council of Churches sees no moral distinction between artificial
contraception and the rhythm method.) Under a rhythm approach the
most "safe" period usually is approximately the last week of the
menstrual cycle. One shortcoming from the point of view of population
control is the possibility of error in computing this period. The
menstrual cycle is not regular in at least one out of five women. Perhaps
another is that it leaves much of the month "unsafe" for the husband and
wife to express physically and unstintingly their love for each other.
There is, however, more than technique involved in bringing a
population into equilibrium. Inclination of the citizens is perhaps more
important. Ireland, which is overwhelmingly Catholic, is outstanding
among the nations of the world that have got their birth rate under
control. The Irish did it—to combat the grinding poverty that is now
only a distant memory—largely by postponing marriage.
The United States Congress could by a slight modification of the
income-tax laws provide a powerful incentive to most Americans to get
their nation's population into equilibrium somewhere short of
250,000,000. It could drop the present provision of allowing a $600
deduction for each dependent child. In its place it might provide an
$800 deduction for the first child, $600 for the second, $400 for the
third, and $200 for any additional children.
Even assuming that the people of the United States can achieve a
tolerable balance between resources and population, two challenging
facts already in existence remain to be contended with.
One is the generation of youths born in the postwar baby boom that
is about to flood the labor market. These young people are already in
the pipelines, to use the businessman's phrase. No amount of population
control is going to change the fact that the labor force is expected to rise
by 13,500,000 in this present decade.
The other challenging fact is the relentless rise every year in manhour productivity, thanks largely to the labor-saving brought by
automation.
How to cope with these stubborn facts without resorting to
profligacy poses the central economic enigma of our decade. Any
efforts to come to grips with them will put the nation on largely
uncharted trails. Solutions will not be easy. It does appear possible,
however, to point to what seem to be the five most likely trails for
breaking out of the dilemma that these facts present. As the dilemma
deepens in the coming decade, they should be explored and subjected to
trial.
Trail Number One leads in the direction of cutting down the hours a
year that the average person works as the machines become more
efficient. This takes us into the controversial area of the four-day week
or some variation thereof. Steelworkers in their 1959 contract
discussion seriously broached the novel notion of a three-month paid
vacation every five years for each worker. It was estimated that this
would create 30,000 additional jobs. And their president in 1960 began
pressing the idea of a 32-hour week. Other suggestions have centered on
reducing the number of teen-agers in the labor market by raising
educational requirements.
John Kenneth Galbraith, Harvard economist, proposes that the
United States remove any necessary connection between a person's
income and his productivity. In The Affluent Society he argued: "If
unemployment is a disaster for individuals, we have no choice but
always to produce at or near the capacity of the labor force" and pour
out increasingly unimportant goods. How do you remove the element of
personal disaster? He proposed that "unemployment compensation
should be increased as unemployment increases—and should be
diminished as full employment is approached." This method would
assure people of security in times of high unemployment, when they
would have scant chance of finding work anyhow; and would prod them
into hustling to find a job when unemployment was relatively low. He
felt such a system would "enable us to take a more relaxed and rational
view of output without subjecting individual members of the society to
hardship."
Mr. Galbraith's theorizing led him to the possibility of the
emergence of a large body of citizens who would be blessed with a
great deal of leisure time. He viewed this with more cheerfulness than
many of us—perhaps because of our baggage of vestigial puritanism—
can still muster.
It is questionable whether American citizens are prepared yet to
cope even with the semileisure of a four-day week. They hate to be idle
even more than most people. Their three-week vacations are generally
periods of frenzied activity. When they find themselves favored with a
short work week, many get themselves a second job. More than four
million of them have joined the ranks of the "moonlighters," or doublejob holders.
And then there is another hazard that growing leisure poses. It tends
to stimulate the desire to consume. Paul Mazur pointed out that the
growth in leisure time produced by the shorter work week "represents a
huge increase in the time available for consumption." And Business
Week has noted that "the more time people have outside their working
day, the more marked is their propensity to consume goods and services
of all kinds." This tendency to increase consumption as leisure increases
may be exciting to the goods producers but offers little cheer to the
conservationists concerned about the nation's shrinking resources.
Furthermore, in terms of life satisfaction, acts of consumption are
no adequate substitute for acts of individual productivity. What will
happen to the dignity of man if he finds that his main contribution is to
be as a consumer rather than as a creator?
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology mathematician Norbert
Wiener, one of the theoretical pioneers of automation, worries that he
may have helped create a monster. He has expressed concern about
what will become of man's dignity and freedom if we achieve a fully
mechanized society where jobless, debased workers roam the streets
and even receive their unemployment checks from a machine.
All this would seem to indicate that while Trail Number One should
undoubtedly be thoroughly explored, and does offer a major opportunity
for easing the developing dilemma, it will need to be explored with
care.
The second major possibility—or Trail Number Two—would
involve an attempt to tune down the economy somewhat, even if it
means settling for a more modest level of living.
This would focus on the challenge of removing the goad of everrising technological efficiency. The relentless pressure coming from the
present annual increase in man-hour productivity—and its seemingly
constant companion, ever-rising wage costs—may be the American
Way, but it is also becoming a wolf nipping everlastingly at the nation's
heels. It demands that the nation keep upping its consumption or face
the consequences in sharply increased unemployment.
Obviously, chasing away this wolf will be a very tricky business.
Even assuming it can be accomplished without disaster, what will
happen to the restless, expansive American character in the process?
But just as obviously an attempt will have to be made sooner or
later if the nation is to be saved from exhaustion due to hyperactivity.
Somehow, sometime, American citizens will start modifying their value
system by placing a lower value on the social usefulness of their
machines. When that time comes, they will start viewing more
skeptically the fairly constant current steam of exhortations for more
growth, more product innovations, more sales.
As things stand, these clarion calls are accepted—at least by most
businessmen—as mandates. Mr. Mazur exhorts: "Our economic system
requires incessant growth." Mr. Mortimer, chairman of the board of
General Foods, asserts matter-of-factly that "business must continue to
grow or it will slip back swiftly. There is no standing still." And Ray
Eppert, president of Burroughs Corporation, told a meeting of the
National Association of Manufacturers:
"Top management's nightmare is the horrible thought 'What would
happen to us if in the next quarter we suddenly saw our revenue, our
sales, decrease ten, fifteen, or twenty percent?' In most instances this
would not merely decrease profits correspondingly—it would wipe
them out. Business must grow or die. . . . Now is the time to install costcutting equipment. . . . Now is the time to research and develop those
products we are going to need in future years and to increase our selling
impact. The dynamism of the American economy is not built in. It must
be continually generated."
Bankers have been encouraging this straining for new products and
new models by asking businessmen seeking credit what innovations
they have up their sleeve. Many bankers are wary of applicants who
have only "old" products.
Occasionally there have been protests from retailers charged with
moving ever-higher mountains of goods. They have begged for relief.
An appliance buyer complained: "Beating annual production records in
electrical housewares has become a fetish that seems to serve no
constructive purpose. . . . Why not accept the fact that the market is
saturated on some items?" And a New Jersey automobile dealer
protested what he felt was flagrant overproduction of automobiles and
proposed that some sort of maximum yearly production figure be set for
new cars each year by a committee representing the public, the dealers,
and the manufacturers.
There is evidence, too, that some producers are learning to turn a
profit while operating at substantially less than capacity or below
generally accepted break-even points. The chairman of Republic Steel
observed during the 1958 recession, "We intend to make money at
whatever capacity." And Mr. Romney, the head of American Motors,
has observed, happily, that his company has learned how to operate
profitably on a break-even point in output of a specific make that is far
under that of the Big Three motorcar makers.
It is conceivable that the United States may reach a point where it
will even consider it advisable to turn down its machinery of desire
stimulation somewhat, especially if the sellers keep stoking that
machinery with more and more billions of dollars each year to stimulate
desire. This is not an unprecedented suggestion. When consumer goods
were scarce in Great Britain after World War II, a tax on advertising
was being considered in order to keep down desire stimulation. The
advertisers, under this pressure, came up with a Voluntary Limitation on
Advertising. It was accepted by the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Major
advertisers of rationed goods and luxuries agreed to cut back their
advertising outlays 15 per cent.
They also agreed to "conduct their advertising" so as not to
"increase inflationary pressure of demand." The agreement with
modifications lasted for two years. And for a much longer period British
advertising was curbed by a variety of controls. The use of electricity
for advertising, for example, was forbidden altogether.
It is also quite conceivable that Americans might ultimately learn to
lead stimulating lives at a somewhat lower level of consumption
without feeling deprived or oppressed. My elderly friend running the
supermarket in Indianapolis offers the opinion that any homemaker can
cut family food bills by a quarter without noticeably affecting quality
just by exercising prudence and frugality. Consider President
Eisenhower's expressed fear that the young people of the United States
are growing soft. While he was voicing this fear, school boards in many
towns were each spending hundreds of thousands of dollars of taxpayer
money to build parking lots capable of accommodating the hundreds of
motorcars owned by students who might better walk to school or come
by bus.
And then there is the question of how much real gain in the United
States standard of living is involved when women are persuaded to own
five bathing suits instead of one. And how much is involved when
people are persuaded to cast aside their new car when it is twenty-seven
months old instead of keeping it until it is fifty or one hundred months
old?
A woman in Berkeley, California, wrote a magazine that she was
starting to feel smug about the poor gadget-ridden Americans who were
having so much trouble getting their motorcars and appliances serviced.
She described herself as a free soul because she had no appliances or
television in her home.
Samuel Butler in his Erewhon depicted a society of Erewhonians
who concluded they were being enslaved by their machines. Politically
they divided into two parties, the machinists and the anti-machinists.
The leading philosophers of each faction argued the growing role that
machines were playing in their lives.
The anti-machinists conceded that the machines were benevolent
masters and would treat them decently just as the Erewhonians treated
their own domesticated horses and dogs decently. Still they argued, "Is
it not plain that the machines are gaining ground upon us . . . ? They
serve that they may rule."
The anti-machinists won the day; and the Erewhonians proceeded to
smash every machine and "mechanized appliance" invented in the
preceding 271 years. The Erewhonians then returned to an idyllic
pastoral way of life in which simplicity, kindly genial manners, and the
quest of beauty were cherished above material possessions. Behind their
mountains they shunned the bustling materialistic world thereafter, and
without regret.
It undoubtedly is a little late for Americans to consider putting
sledge hammers to their robot machines. But quite possibly in coming
decades the rewards these robots can bring may be less highly prized.
Such a shift in attitude would help ease the problem of coping with the
nation's fabulous production machine.
A third possibility—or Trail Number Three—would be to devote
more energy and more money to searching for brand-new kinds of
innovations for the consumer that would fill a genuine need and
represent a real break-through for technology.
I'm thinking of innovations on the order of the motorcar, the radio,
the refrigerator, the jet airplane. Each upon its appearance has given the
United States economy an enormous boost and, directly or indirectly,
has created thousands or even millions of new jobs.
If United States industry would divert into the quest of such
revolutionary innovations a fraction of the billions of dollars now being
poured into devising flossier packaging, improving product mix to
command greater shelf space, developing patentable imitations of
existing products, and creating obsolescence of quality or desirability,
then epoch-making breakthroughs might well occur. George Romney of
American Motors seemed to allude to this challenge when in mid-1960
he observed, "The attempt annually to create products that are merely
camouflaged to seem better is a colossal misdirection of effort away
from useful innovation."
One example of an innovation that would represent a real and useful
break-through if reasonably priced would be the use of ultrasonic
devices to clean fabrics and cooking and eating utensils. Another that
could be enormously useful in many situations would be the picture
telephone.
Some of the most obviously needed innovations are in the area of
travel because of the present traffic-clotted highways, the widespread
deterioration of railroad service, the growing depletion of known United
States reserves of oil, and the growing pollution of the urban air with
gasoline fumes. Vehicles are needed to cut through the congestion of
urban sprawl. The small, safe one- or two-seater helicopter for family
use is still a most attractive dream. The motorcar with a gas-turbine
engine—and beyond that the electric-powered car—represents a highly
desirable goal. A quiet electric car would reduce greatly the drain on
both metal and petroleum supplies. It originally failed largely because
no adequate power supply could be developed. Now, however, with
advanced technology, including the development (and evident early
suppression) of the nickel-cadmium battery which costs about $100 but
outlasts the average motorcar, the dream of the electric car seems less
remote. Quite possibly, service stations now devoted primarily to
pumping gasoline products could become devoted primarily to battery
recharging. A car owner on a long trip could simply turn in his depleted
battery for recharging and for a fee take in its place a now-charged
battery left there by an earlier motorist. If batteries can be made
commercially that will power a car for, say, one hundred miles, then the
electric runabout will come close to reality.
And then there is the levacar, a very attractive dream for mass
transportation for short-haul trips to the suburbs or to nearby
metropolitan centers. The levacar is much like a train except that a
stream of compressed air lifts it a fraction of an inch above the track to
reduce friction. The Ford Motor Company has already built
experimental levacars. The advantage of the levacar over the train, bus,
or motorcar is that it has the potentiality of going like a streak, 200 to
500 miles per hour. And its advantage over the airplane for short-haul
trips is that its terminals or stations could be readily accessible inside
cities and not out on the edge of the cities. As it is, if you wish to hop
from Cleveland to Columbus by airplane, you may waste nearly two
hours in getting to and from airports.
A fourth possibility—or Trail Number Four—would involve
systematically encouraging the already apparent shift from the
producing industries to the service industries (excluding those devoted
to repair). Producing activities—or those devoted to fabricating such
things as appliances, mining such things as iron ore, or growing such
things as wheat—have for quite a few years been shrinking as sources
of employment as a result of the impact of automation and other
mechanized duplication of jobs once done by people. On the other hand,
opportunities continue to open up in such service fields as travel,
insurance, restaurants, hotel and motel operation, recreation, cultural
activities, health-improvement activities, and education for both
children and adults.
The service fields are particularly promising as areas for attacking
the problem of maintaining reasonably full employment at annual
incomes fairly close to present levels. (And any solution must meet
these requirements in order for it to have any real prospect of success.)
For one thing, the service industries generally make only modest use of
the nation's natural, irreplaceable resources. And for another, they are
capable of far greater reasonable expansion than the producing
industries. Even by straining with such strategies as planned
obsolescence, it is doubtful that the refrigerator industry can hope to do
more than double the average family's consumption of refrigerators in
the next several decades. On the other hand, the average family's
involvement in travel, cultural, or educational activities can be
expanded five, ten, or conceivably even twenty times. Toll television, it
might be added, offers the potentiality for an explosion in demand for
creative theatrical talent.
And now we come to possible Trail Number Five, which seems to
deserve treatment in a separate chapter because of its importance, its
ramifications, and the national controversy it is already creating.
CHAPTER 24
Facing the Unmet Challenges
"Bright new cars in sordid streets, ranch-type or split-level homes
beside garbage-filled gutters, the family picnic basket in chromium
beside the polluted stream—these are symbols of a national pattern of
expenditure in desperate need of redress." —BARBARA WARD
POSSIBLE TRAIL NUMBER FIVE WOULD LEAD TO FINDING NEW OUTLETS
for the nation's creative energy.
The conservative-Republican-businessman school tends to the belief
that filling the desires of American consumers, exploring outer space,
and maintaining whatever military posture is necessary to keep the
Russians in line are challenges adequate to drain off these energies for
years to come.
And pretty clearly the desires of customer-consumers come first.
Raymond J. Saulnier, chairman of the President's Council of Economic
Advisors, stated: "As I understand the economy, its ultimate purpose is
to produce more consumer goods. This is the object of everything we
are working at: to produce things for consumers."
The liberal Democratic Senator Joseph S. Clark, Jr., of
Pennsylvania, however, took sharp issue with this concept of "the object
of everything." He stated: "The goal of our economy is not the
production of more consumer goods at all. The goal of our economy is
to provide an environment in which every American family can have a
good house for living and shelter, a good school to which to send the
children, good transportation facilities, and good opportunities for
cultural and spiritual advancement."
Not goods but environment! A number of liberal voices—and some
moderately conservative ones, too—have been suggesting the need for a
re-examination of priorities. And most of the proposals have centered
on the need to start focusing on environment rather than goods.
One early voice was that of Harvard economist Alvin Han-sen, who
in the mid-fifties pointed out to Congress that the attainment of material
abundance in the United States should be producing a change in major
challenges. In relatively poor societies, he said, it was understandable
that the acquisition of material goods should be the chief cause of
concern. "But," he added, "have we not by now reached in the United
States a degree of plenty with respect to the physical necessities which
would permit greater attention to education, health, recreation, and the
rich, varied range of cultural activities in general?"
When the Russians outachieved the United States in launching earth
satellites, a host of protests were heard that the United States had got
itself too preoccupied with the consumption of goods. The Russians
themselves had gloated that they had been building satellites while
Americans were busy building fancy tail fins for their motorcars.
Whether preoccupation with satellites would impress historians as being
more socially significant than preoccupation with tail fins might be
arguable; but the tail fins did symbolize the American preoccupation
with self-indulgence via goods consumption.
Walter Lippmann protested that "our people have been led to
believe the enormous fallacy that the highest purpose of the American
social order is to multiply the enjoyment of consumer goods. As a
result, our public institutions, particularly those having to do with
education and research, have been . . . scandalously starved." He felt
that the country was waiting to be led by "another innovator" with the
imagination of a Teddy Roosevelt or a Woodrow Wilson or a Franklin
D. Roosevelt.
Economic writer Barbara Ward put this "starvation" of basic social
needs in the United States at $9,000,000,000 a year. (Your author made
his own first tentative observations on the need for a shift in
challenges—and the need to give more attention to several badly
neglected areas of national life such as urban blight—in the May 11,
19S8, issue of The New York Times Magazine.)
There were a number of references to the fact that the people of the
United States were enjoying private opulence amid public poverty. City
planner Victor Gruen offered the opinion that "although we are the
richest nation with the highest individual living standard, we have one
of the lowest 'public living standards' of Western nations. Our cities are
littered with ugliness and choked with automobiles." Harvard historian
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., asserted, "It is not that our capabilities are
inadequate, it is that our priorities—which mean our values—are
wrong." On the other hand, Fortune magazine dismissed the talks of
those who attack the public poverty amid private opulence as "New
Mask for Big Government." Conservative economists challenged at
least the alleged "public poverty" by pointing to the highways, schools,
and hospitals built in the past decade. But was what had been done
enough—especially when compared with the hundreds of billions of
dollars spent each year in satisfying private wants through purchase of
consumer goods?
Edwin L. Dale, Jr., writer on economic trends for The New York
Times, reported in 1960 a widespread conviction in Washington that
this issue of private vs. public spending would be the Great American
Debate of the Sixties.
United States businessmen enjoy rising to challenges and like to say
that they are glad to make an honest dollar wherever they can. The calls
to tackle the American environment, however, left them wary. A person
can't go down to the store and order a new park. A park requires unified
effort, and that gets you into voting and public spending and maybe
soak-the-rich taxes. As a result of the wariness of many powerful
businessmen over the years, a heavy cloud of opprobrium had been
hung over any proposals to do anything more than decency required
about improving environment.
That appears to be the major reason why most Americans have
come to view any private spending—whether for deodorants, hula
hoops, juke boxes, padded bras, dual mufflers, horror comics, or electric
rotisseries—as good for the nation and any public spending as a
necessary burden to be suffered.
The result has been a clear social imbalance. Professor John
Galbraith has pointed up some of the odd results of this imbalance by
noting the handicap of public endeavors when it comes to organized
desire stimulation. "Every corner of the public psyche is canvassed," he
states, "to see if the desire for some merchantable product can be
cultivated." Yet, he adds, he would be immeasurably shocked to see the
deliberate cultivation of wants applied to public services. He suggests
that businessmen have sought to scorn public spending not only because
they are large taxpayers but also for the more human reason that they
see any expansion of concern with public wants as a threat to their own
prestige. The result is "a vehement insistence that the government does
not produce anything, that it is a barren whore," he observed in The
Affluent Society.
Actually, economists make no distinction between public and
private goods and services when they tote up the over-all output of the
economy, or gross national product. Even businessmen exult, as we've
seen, when the gross national product rises for whatever cause. They
see it as a portent of prosperity. An increase in teachers' salaries has the
same standing in totaling the gross national product as an increase in the
output of power lawn mowers. Still, according to the American business
creed, which finds general acceptance in the popular mind, any
spending for public wants is a barely tolerable burden. Galbraith points
to some resulting contradictions: "Automobiles have an importance
greater than the roads on which they are driven . . . education [becomes]
unproductive and the manufacturer of the school toilet seats productive.
. . . Vacuum cleaners to insure clean houses are praiseworthy and
essential to our standard of living. Street cleaners to insure clean streets
are an unfortunate expense. Partly as a result, our houses are generally
clean and our streets generally filthy."
There are some indications that even marketers are beginning to
recognize that in coming years, for better or worse, more and more of
the nation's productive energy may be channeled into trying to improve
environment by filling public needs. Printers' Ink has published with
seeming approval an analysis by Cornell University's Ernest Dale,
which pointed to the advantages that might come to the economy from
assigning "a higher value to public services." Dale in his analysis spoke
matter-of-factly of reports that public services had been "neglected and
starved for years." He added that, incredible as it might seem, the
proportion of the gross national product going to public services—
exclusive of defense—is "about the same as in President Hoover's day."
And he suggested that marketers start pondering what products they
could produce that "will fit in the government's increasing share of
national output. . . . The expansion of the public market might do more
good than harm to marketing men. It will mean better education, better
recreation, more pleasant living conditions, and less waste through
juvenile delinquency, crime, slums, and mental illness. . . . It may even
raise the purchasing power of the private market."
Quite possibly one reason for the growth in resigned acceptance by
business of the idea that public wants should be more fully met was its
awareness that enchanting Americans purely with private consumer
goods was becoming more and more difficult. Fortune magazine
intimated this when it calmly predicted that during the sixties
Americans "may show an increasing desire for technological advances
other than the kind that can be bought at retail."
Although some public needs might be more obviously urgent than
some of the private wants and needs being met, the nation would still
lose if in satisfying them it brought a serious drain on its natural
resources. Care would still need to be taken to see that the nation's raw
materials and energy were not squandered. Fortunately, many of the
more urgent public needs—such as for more street cleaners, hospital
personnel, teachers, and technicians for building good will overseas—
are in the area of the production of services rather than of goods.
What, then, are some of the important unmet challenges that might
bear examining as possibilities for attracting a larger share of the
creative energy of Americans?
One major challenge is to do something dramatic about the growing
sleaziness, dirtiness, and chaos of the nation's great exploding
metropolitan areas. The postwar trek of city dwellers to find a little
patch in the country is becoming more and more irrational if the
breadwinner must still work in the city. An exhausting daily journey is
being added to his day's work, which leaves him time for only glimpses
of his children. And to what end? The "country" place in the suburbs
loses its "semirural" character as soon as a subdivision goes up beyond
it, if not sooner (even though a subdivision house with its patch of grass
in the suburbs may be preferable to an old row house in the city).
I overheard a shoestore owner in Montgomery, Alabama, voice a
common lament. He said: "My wife and I wanted to get out in the
country, so we bought a little place out on the edge of the city four years
ago. Today, we're only halfway out."
Most of the developers, with their eye on total dollar return, have
been skimping on parks and playgrounds. And their "community"
centers usually turn out to be shopping centers from which they derive a
large part of their profit on the total project. They sell captive audiences
to the merchandisers.
The United States through most of its history has been an inviting
target for spoilers who made their killing and moved on. Many spoilers
have been at work among those who are expanding the perimeters of
America's metropolitan areas. Vast smoke-blanketed wastelands of
slums, junk yards, used-car lots, and row houses have been left behind
as Americans have kept fleeing to the outer edges. It appears to be time
for American city dwellers, and entrepreneurs, too, to begin looking
inward rather than outward for their opportunities. Richardson
Dilworth, the crusading mayor of Philadelphia, eloquently supported
this point when he said: "The real frontiers of America today are inside
the big cities."
A survey reported by United States public-health officials shows
that the air of cities across the land is getting dirtier. The dozen worst:
Charleston, West Virginia; East Chicago, Indiana; Phoenix, Arizona;
Los Angeles and San Bernardino, California; Chicago, Illinois;
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Buffalo, New York; Detroit, Michigan; St.
Louis, Missouri; El Paso, Texas; and Anchorage, Alaska.
Other investigations show that the slum problem in the great cities
is worsening. William L. C. Wheaton, the director of urban studies at
the University of Pennsylvania, summed up the over-all challenge by
stating that Americans should "frankly recognize that older central cities
are crowded and dirty. They lack open space; they lack playgrounds;
they lack good schools; in fact they are deplorably short on the
amenities that we might expect of the richest civilization in man's
history."
These are challenges that require unified effort. A single property
owner would justifiably feel discouraged. The national organization for
civic improvement, ACTION, estimates that it would cost about one
hundred billion dollars to wipe out United States slums. Billions more
could justifiably be spent in general urban renewal each year and in
cutting through the choking congestion brought by the automobile by
developing swift public transit systems. This could help reunify the
sprawling metropolitan areas.
A number of cities have started on long-range plans to rejuvenate
and scrub up at least the cores of their metropolitan areas. Kalamazoo
and Pittsburgh are outstanding examples. In some cases, however, all
the overhauling and building of malls is aimed simply at making
downtown more attractive for consumers to spend money and for other
commercial purposes. In Toledo, Ohio, which built a fine downtown
mall, the value of it was so largely judged by whether it helped the sales
volume of downtown stores that the Toledo Blade felt it necessary to
remind the city that malls should be regarded as city parks and not
simply as aids for merchants. In much the same way, many cities have
been scrambling to build big, new downtown auditoriums. The primary
purpose usually is to attract business conventions that will bring freespenders to downtown areas. Little thought is given to the larger
problem of civilizing these downtown jungles for noncommercial
purposes.
One of the notable exceptions is the Lincoln Center, taking form on
twelve acres in Manhattan, where libraries, museums, music schools,
and concert halls will rise.
The thing that the traveler in the United States misses most in cities
outside New England is a heart, a focal point. It can be a green, or a
fountain, or a monument as in Indianapolis. Most European cities have
their lovely Arc de Triomphe or Piazza San Marco, which give a sense
of delight and majesty to their entire city. In most American cities the
heart of the city is simply the street intersection where the biggest
department store and bank face each other. And walk five blocks in any
direction, and you are deep in slums, warehouses, or used-car lots.
The challenge of tackling urban blight in the United States does not
necessarily mean tearing down miles of buildings and replacing them
with thirty-story concrete slabs jutting up from fenced-off grassland.
Inhabitants would be happier if they could simply have their old
neighborhood homes and streets spruced up, with some pleasant open
spaces added.
The authors of The Exploding Metropolis 1 repeatedly make the
point that the grouped towers going up in many redevelopment projects
already under way are pretty uninviting places. They are all very much
alike. They lack intimacy or individuality or surprise. They are too
orderly and cold. One architect is quoted as saying that most of the
architects designing these grouped towers wouldn't be caught dead
living in these dull Utopias themselves. Instead, they "look for a beat-up
old house that they can fix up into something more amiable than a
logical set of cells on the fourteenth floor."
Most urban areas are desperately short of the kinds of places where
people can relax comfortably without spending much money: picnic
groves, museums, libraries, public beaches, parks, ball parks for
amateurs, golf courses, tennis courts, and gardens. Nothing seems to
bring warmth and graciousness to brick and concrete surroundings more
than splashes of flowers and rows of trees, as the managers of New
York's Radio City have learned. A number of cities such as New
Orleans, Seattle, Cincinnati, and Norfolk are seeking to add new vitality
and beauty to their cities, and one way they are doing it is by large-scale
planting of trees and flowers.
In an age when so many college students are cynics absorbed in
"privitism," it is perhaps not surprising that at a school devoted to urban
planning a professor told me of his delighted amazement at the
passionate idealism of his students.
Another major challenge that invites the creative energy of
Americans is that of remaking the great arid areas of the country, and
helping to remake the arid areas of friendly lands overseas. This can be
done by massive redirection, harnessing, and transformation of water.
Water so redirected, transformed, stored, or harnessed in river-valley
developments is likely to be relatively expensive water. But with the
United States and world population growth already at hand and with
water tables in many areas falling, the changes are needed even at high
cost.
The United States government might greatly step up its
investigations into ways to produce fresh water economically from salt
water or brackish water. Until recently, it has been spending less per
year than it spends on one bomber. Many scientists have long felt that
salt-water conversion offers the most sensible way to make use of the
slumbering genie of atomic power. In fact, the development of an
economical way to convert salt water, with atomic energy or not, could
do more to transform the world than atomic energy is currently doing.
Conversion of salt water or brackish into fresh water on a millionsof-gallons-a-day basis already is taking place in such water-short places
as Aruba in the West Indies and Al Kuwait on the Persian Gulf. The
Office of Saline Water of the United States Department of the Interior
has pilot plants operating and is building five demonstration plants to
try out on a fairly large-scale basis five of the most promising methods.
All involve either taking the water out of the salt, by either distillation
or freezing, or screening the salt out of the water, as with a membrane
process. The plants will be located at such places as Freeport, Texas,
and San Diego, California.
The cost is still a problem but is within sight of becoming attractive
in many situations where water is short. Today, it costs only one fifth as
much to obtain one thousand gallons of fresh water from the sea as it
did in 1950. The director of the Office of Saline Water is now confident
that the office can produce one thousand gallons of water for one dollar.
That is still too high to appeal to most water users. However, in a few
years he hopes to get the price down to forty cents per thousand gallons,
which would make it appealing to many water-short cities.
It is doubtful whether in our lifetime the price can ever be reduced
low enough to be economical for American farmers in arid areas many
miles away from a coast. The cost would have to get down to about a
nickel for one thousand gallons. But it is conceivable that within the
coming decade costs can be brought down to close to twenty cents per
thousand gallons, which would make it attractive for irrigation in some
water-desperate countries.
As for redirecting water, the United States has a number of gushing
little rivers that pour wastefully into the ocean—especially in the
Northwest. By rechanneling or tunneling, these can be sent hundreds of
miles overland to aid tired, shallow rivers. The Bureau of Reclamation
is learning how to make rivers go uphill under their own power in a
bootstrap-lifting operation. Its officials believe that the bureau can help
transform millions of acres of desert into garden land if given the funds.
This is the bold kind of challenge that should appeal to Americans
looking for new outlets for their energy. And in this connection we
should not forget rainmaking and other weather modification
techniques. Although rainmaking has largely dropped from the news, it
is receiving very close study from such organizations as the National
Science Foundation. One basic fact the investigators grapple with is that
the great moist air masses that come in over the Pacific and cross the
North American continent still have three quarters of their original
moisture with them when they move on out over the Atlantic. And
seeding the clouds with silver iodide will definitely bring down some of
that moisture. A second basic fact is that ordinary snowfall and rainfall
are most inefficient in bringing down the moisture that is up there. Even
a very heavy snow brings down only a fraction of 1 per cent of the
moisture overhead. One of the lessons learned is that cloud seeding
works best near mountainous areas and seems to offer the most worthwhile results in the eleven most western states, particularly Idaho,
Colorado, Washington, Oregon, and California. The Advisory
Committee on Weather Control set up by Congress concluded that in
western states cloud seeding produced an average increase in rainfall of
more than 10 per cent. Such an annual increase in favorable areas could
bring down an extra fifteen million acre feet of water onto the eleven
western states. This could represent an enormous boon to local
municipalities, farmers, and industries. But before weather modification
can be attempted on any large-scale basis, a federal authority on the
order of the Civil Aeronautics Board should be established to set—and
enforce—the ground rules. Otherwise the program will bog down in
wrangling—if not legal action.
The challenge of providing a good modern education for the tens of
millions of youngsters born since Pearl Harbor could also quite
reasonably command far more of the nation's energy than it does. In a
number of cities, at least a fourth of the students are being instructed in
substandard buildings. And in some California towns students have
been going to class in tents. In many hundreds of schools, the teachers
average more than thirty-five students to a class; or the schools are on
double or triple session.
With the shrinking of natural resources, the nation's human talent is
becoming more crucial to the nation's safety and well-being. In recent
years, the nation has been spending less than 4 per cent of its national
income a year on education. That is about the same amount that
Americans pay each year to reduce their installment debts on their
multitudes of motorcars. The President's Science Advisory Committee
has proposed that by 1966 Americans, at the very least, double their
spending on education. A spokesman for the United States Office of
Education likewise has expressed conviction that spending for
education should double. But it was made clear that this view did not
necessarily reflect the thinking of the President. Such a program would
channel more than fifteen billion additional dollars' worth of the nation's
energy into education each year.
In 1960, the United States had a shortage of a quarter-million
classrooms, and faced a minimum need of at least an additional quartermillion rooms within five years because of increased enrollments. It
also faced the need of a full half-million additional teachers. And if the
schools are to attract talented and ambitious young people into teaching
careers, then average teaching salaries must be raised at least 50 per
cent. In the past year I have visited more than a dozen American
teachers' colleges. A few have been most impressive, but I must confess
that I have left many of them feeling depressed about the caliber of
students being attracted into teaching careers.
The federal government's role in promoting education needs reexamination. Over the past decade it has been contributing less and less
of the total cost of education despite its far greater access to money
resources than the local and state governments. Recently the United
States government has been spending about one penny for education for
every dollar it is spending for defense. Certainly at the college level the
federal government's stake in assuring the nation of a body of scientists
and responsible leaders for the future is obvious and urgent. Today,
more than a hundred thousand talented high-school graduates—certified
to be college material—fail to go on to college specifically because of
lack of money. The cost of college is rising much faster than family
incomes. Here seems to be an opportunity for the federal government to
make a contribution. If it offered 48,000 scholarships—as Senator
Humphrey proposed—it would still mean a scholarship for only one
student in two hundred.
Even more imperative is the need to help the colleges themselves. It
is hard to see how the usual arguments about hands-off-the-minds-ofour-children can conceivably be invoked in direct programs to help
institutions of higher education meet their staggering increases in costs.
With enrollments likely to triple in the next dozen years, the colleges
face the appalling task of raising perhaps thirty billion dollars if they are
to meet the challenge adequately.
The nation's critical and persistent shortage of health facilities and
health personnel constitutes still another of the major unmet challenges
facing Americans. Nurses, doctors, therapists, and technicians are in
such short supply that the situation is becoming alarming. The nation's
medical schools would need to grow by at least 40 per cent just to turn
out enough doctors to cope with the population growth of the next
decade or so. And that would not reduce the existing shortage of trained
physicians. Even more alarming—in view of the population
explosion—is the shortage of hospital beds: nearly a million. (And this
is while a steel company is launching a million-dollar campaign to
persuade Americans to throw away their old beds and get wider ones!)
The challenge of eliminating the shortage of medical personnel and
facilities would absorb more than twenty billion dollars in extra effort in
the next five years.
And then there is the collateral challenge of easing the terror of the
growing millions of people past sixty-five whom the nation insists upon
retiring at ever-earlier ages even though their prime of life is continually
being extended. Most of these people are being forced to subsist on
incomes of less than $1,000 a year in an era of overabundance when
average family income has passed $6,500 a year. These people should
be assured they won't become a drag on their children or become wards
of society in ill health or old age. Earlier societies took care of their old.
But in hyper-mobile United States, families become scattered over
thousands of miles, and distance helps offspring feel nonresponsible.
We should not overlook, either, the now poorly met challenges of
reversing the shrinkage of forest lands, of conservation of the shrinking
arable land, and combating the spread of pollution in both air and water.
A final challenge worth careful examination is that of helping the
people of friendly nations enjoy a little more of the fabulous abundance
attained in the United States. One way would be to help nations
critically short on energy sources—such as Italy and Pakistan—set up
atomic-power stations. Nuclear power is likely to be economically
attractive to many other countries before it is to coal-rich United States.
Another way would be by selling or sending overseas goods that the
United States still excels at making.
Labor leader Walter Reuther tells of watching a dam being rushed
in northern India to harness the monsoon rains. A few giant earthmoving machines made by members of his union back in Peoria,
Illinois, were at work. But most of the earth moving was being done by
thousands of men, women, and children working with little straw
baskets and wooden shovels, and they progressed slowly. An Indian
official of the project expressed regret that they didn't have a few more
earth-moving machines. He said it would have enabled them to
complete the dam a whole monsoon season earlier, build new roads and
irrigation projects, and bring at least a trickling of prosperity and wellbeing to the valley. But he said his group lacked the cash to pay for
more earth movers. Reuther went on to make the point that at that very
moment there were "acres and acres of these machines parked" back in
Peoria, sitting idle. And five thousand of his union members in Peoria
were idle for lack of orders, and other thousands were working only part
time. A more active policy of economic co-operation on the part of the
United States government might have assured the Indians the credit they
needed to buy the needed earth movers.
Senator J. W. Fulbright, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee, has been urging Americans to realize that a world-wide
revolution is going on "in the will for improved living conditions." He
feels that the position of the United States "demands that we export
more capital to underdeveloped countries so that they can increase their
own industrial production, to our mutual advantage." The senator adds
that it would be dangerous for the United States to ignore this revolution
or to try to discourage it for selfish reasons. He explains:
"We are in for serious trouble if we think that we are at liberty to get
richer while most of the rest of the world gets poorer." That would
appear to be particularly true since the United States must now depend
upon the rest of the world for an ever-larger share of the raw materials it
needs to prosper, or even to survive. At this writing the United States
government seems rather desperately embarrassed by its lack of friends
among the rank and file of Asiatics, Africans, and South Americans.
This does not complete the list of unmet challenges for building up
the nation's social capital, but even these listed could readily absorb
more than 10 per cent of the nation's total creative energy—or more
than is now going to defense.
One formidable obstacle that arises when any enlargement of the
public sector of the economy is considered—by meeting such
challenges as here described—is the mechanics for paying for them.
Few reasonable people, I suspect, would care to argue that the world's
richest nation cannot afford to devote more than 4 per cent of its output
to educate its swiftly growing population (and educate the millions of
adults interested in self-improvement in their growing amount of spare
time). Yet one gets the impression from listening to comments that
school taxes have become an intolerable burden.
Perhaps the main problem centers in the fact that the word "tax" has
become overburdened with ugly, negative connotations. A tax is
imposed on people even though they may not recall being consulted
about the project in question. Perhaps they didn't read the ballot
carefully, or perhaps they gave their agreement a long time ago. Worse,
taxes are plucked from money we thought we already owned, money we
thought we could dispose of as we pleased. We prefer to forget about
taxes until they are upon us. Also, there is the memory that in the past
taxes have often been used to sock the well-off to help those not welloff. Finally, few Americans seem aware that taxes spent to improve
their schools help the prosperity of their community just as much as
money spent in the community's stores.
Taxes are seen as bad, as money down the drain. Business has
successfully sought to picture them as destroying business incentive or
as "creeping socialism."
Interestingly, the opprobrium generally attached to taxes does not
apply to taxes spent to build military barracks in North Carolina or to
maintain garrisons in Morocco. Rarely does the word "boondoggle"
arise; and this perhaps is not entirely because of the businessman's
concern that the United States maintain an impressive military posture.
Businessmen are of several minds about this spending. Economist
Robert Heilbroner points out that military spending has come to
perform an interesting as well as a critical function in the economy.2 It
provides "channels through which large amounts of public funds can be
spent without trespassing on the traditional areas of private activity." He
explains that in many respects defense spending is an "ideal" source of
economic stimulation. "Not only does much of its procurement reach
down into the very heart of the nation's capital-goods industries such as
aircraft, shipbuilding, steel, construction, etc., but the goods that the
defense effort brings forth in no way compete or intrude upon the
normal economy."
Thus businessmen can view without too much show of choler the
fact that every tenth dollar in the American pocketbook must go to pay
defense taxes and that within this decade it may well become every
seventh dollar.
But let us get back to the anguish caused by the lesser civilian taxes.
As the sixties were about to begin, the Scripps-Howard newspapers
carried the report of a nationwide survey on attitudes toward taxes. The
New York World Telegram and The Sun gave it this page-one banner
headline:
DISCORD IN THE MIDST OF PLENTY
U.S. SICK OF TAX YOKE, SURVEY SHOWS
It reported a "new rise of nationwide tax resentment" and quoted the
mayor of Bloomington, Illinois, as saying: "It's the first thing people
talk about—the new penny on the federal gasoline tax, the Illinois sales
tax increase. And money is being sent overseas when people here at
home need help."
Thus it was that at the height of American prosperity twenty-nine
state governments were in deep financial trouble. Michigan, where
constitutional limitations complicated matters, was even unable to pay
many of its bills for a while. Citizens had been indoctrinated that all
taxes were a burden, and so were in no mood to pay for the new
highways, schools, and hospitals that accompanied their carefree
proliferation of babies.
The foreman of an auto-body shop in Pennsylvania sourly explained
to U.S. News & World Report the standardized ritual that has developed
in the United States for getting necessary things done. "Every politician
who wants a job promises lower taxes; and every politician who gets a
job increases taxes." A girl working for a radio station in Cedar Rapids,
Iowa, offered this explanation for all the groaning about taxes: "It's
because everybody is on such a long credit rope that they yell so loud
about taxes. If any item in their budget goes up, they're in trouble. They
can't afford heavier taxes."
Clearly the nation needs either a more mature citizenry or a more
painless way of extracting taxes if there is to be any large-scale facing
of unmet challenges in the public sector. Perhaps local, state, and the
federal government should imitate private industry and offer projects
requiring public consent to the public with such appeals as "ONLY 3% (a
month)" or "ONLY $20 (down)."
More seriously, it seems apparent that resentment against taxes can
be reduced only if they are collected before the taxpayer ever gets his
hands on the money. Some suggest that the sales tax is the most logical
way to pay for such public benefits in an era of abundance despite the
theoretical inequity of the sales tax. It at least might soften the
resistance of business groups. The big trouble with a sales tax, however,
is its extreme visibility and nuisance characteristic. Sales taxes may be
logical but not practical solutions. Ideally, the money needed for
expanding public services should be collected wherever possible at a
pay roll or other source, or should be paid on a straight commercial
basis as tolls by those benefiting.
Another serious question arises in any move to shift more of the
nation's energy to the challenges of improving the American
environment. Since such a move involves more emphasis on the public
sector, it raises the question of the possible impact on individual
freedom. Would growth in public endeavors reduce the freedom of the
individual?
Most Americans have been experiencing growing difficulty in being
clearly defined individuals. There are so many pressures and so many
things beyond their control. This growing difficulty constitutes a central
challenge of the twentieth century.
At the same time it appears clear that the underlying cause of this
growing impingement on the individual is not any shift to publicly
organized activities from privately organized ones. The underlying
causes, instead, seem to be the impact of the wondrous efficiency of
modern technology on our lives plus the accompanying density of
population. This efficiency of technology has led to the growth of
giantism in organizations—big companies, big government, big unions,
big subdivision developers—as the need has grown to cope with these
changes effectively. Mr. Heilbroner makes this melancholy point in The
Future as History: "Much of this progressive socialization of our lives
will continue no matter what."
He goes on to explain that "we must . . . anticipate a further rise of
the impotence and incompetence of the individual vis-a-vis the social
environment which modern technology creates. . . . the individual will
find himself forced to adapt to technological changes whose advent he
did not order but must nonetheless accept, whose operation is beyond
him, and whose ultimate impact he does not understand. This in turn
implies a further growth of the private and public bureaucracies which
control the complex whole and which support the dependent human
beings."
Any differences between private and public bureaucracies today are
relative—and quite possibly less important than their similarities.
In this connection we have the assurance, for what it is worth, of
historian Henry Steele Commager that the lessening emphasis on
private enterprise in Western Europe and the somewhat greater
emphasis on public endeavor have not produced any notable "drying up
of individualism" in such countries as England or Denmark or Holland.
My own observations during brief visits to those countries do not
inspire me to contradict that assertion. It should be stressed, however,
that all three have systems deeply rooted in political democracy.
At any rate, the United States, as it plunges into the Soaring Sixties,
seems desperately in need of knowing where it is going, what are its
national aims. This need has become so clear that The New York Times
and Life magazine organized an in-print debate on the general theme of
"The National Purpose."
Which brings us to our final thought about suggested courses for the
people of the United States of America.
CHAPTER 25
Achieving an Enduring
Style of Life
"Americans are suffering from a surplus of happiness."—Casual
comment by a lovely, white-haired lady in Wichita Falls, Texas, whose
name but not remark I have forgotten.
THE SUPERABUNDANCE IN QUANTITY OF THE GOOD THINGS OF LIFE IN
the United States may quite possibly be producing a deterioration in the
quality of life—or even the real enjoyment of life—being achieved by
most of its citizens.
Ardent materialism as a guiding philosophy seemed more
appropriate in an earlier day. Early in the last century, the French critic
Alexis de Tocqueville observed that "America is a land of wonders, in
which everything is in constant motion and every change seems an
improvement." John Stuart Mill, observing much the same hustling and
aggrandizement, put it in less flattering terms. He said the United States
was a land where material progress was such a preoccupation that "the
life of the whole of one sex is devoted to dollar-hunting, and the other
to breeding dollar-hunters."
All this hustle and optimism and dollar-hunting produced a society
whose material triumphs became the wonder of the world and whose
style of life was picturesque, if not charming.
Today, however, with materialism pretty clearly in an
overdeveloped stage in the United States, the nature of the challenge the
society confronts appears to be changing. The absorption with—and
pressure toward—acquisition that once had social value appears to be
becoming a hazard of major proportions. Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr
put the hazard in these terms:
"The productive power of our industry threatens to make our culture
subordinate to our economy. . . . More goods and services may lead to a
tremendous pressure upon the consumer to adopt more and more
luxurious living standards for the sake of keeping the economy
healthy." He suggested that such straining to keep up with ever-higher
living standards, especially if for the sake of mere novelty, can "become
a threat to the serenity of life."
A further problem is that the lives of most Americans have become
so intermeshed with acts of consumption that they tend to gain their
feelings of significance in life from these acts of consumption rather
than from their meditations, achievements, inquiries, personal worth,
and service to others.
It is appropriate to wonder, in fact, if a society can have too much of
a good thing and can begin suffering from a surplus of happiness.
Consider a few items of evidence.
The Radio Advertising Bureau reports—with a note of triumph—
that 40 per cent of all American groups going on outings to beaches,
parks, and picnic areas now take along a portable radio. The figure
would have been even higher, I suspect, if the study had been confined
to young people.
Many young Americans have been conditioned to need the noise of
radio pouring steadily into their ears, whether they are on a train,
watching a ball game, or studying. Officials of an Eastern college told
me that pandemonium broke out on their campus when the electric
power went off one afternoon for two hours. Students complained that
they couldn't study without the music of their radios to support them.
Many parents complain of their children's constant need for
amusement via consumption. The children often spend their free hours
moving between movie screen and television screen, with stopovers at
the frappé fountain or at the play room where they play with their $5.95
model kits in which all the parts are stamped out for them. The New
Consumer reported that parents in the town of Golf protested to the
investigators: "We spend more on the children [than our parents did].
The children can't entertain themselves—they need expensive
equipment and toys. Very expensive amusements."
The children are not the only Americans who need fairly constant
and expensive amusements. One of my informants informed me, from
eyewitness experience, that in the gambling center of Las Vegas some
of the toilet booths contain slot machines. (Some of the gambling areas,
it might be added, have installed special slot machines that are childsized.)
Another problem is that the environment for a satisfying style of life
is being undermined by all the emphasis on ever-greater productivity
and consumption. As a result, the nation faces the hazard of developing
a healthy economy within the confines of a psychologically sick and
psychologically impoverished society.
All the current preoccupation of influential Americans with
preserving a healthy economy through growth has drawn an eloquent
retort from one of the nation's great editors, Henry Beetle Hough of The
Vineyard Gazette, Edgartown, Massachusetts. He took as his text for an
editorial a rosy report on the New England economy by the Federal
Reserve Bank of Boston. The report spoke of the economic growth
destined to come from greater investment, greater automation, higher
productivity. Hough commented: "One hears the busy sound of
machinery grinding past on the streets, headed for 1970." He granted
that the prophecy was reassuring as far as it went, but he added:
"Would it not be well to hear from a poet, an artist, a naturalist, a
humanist, based on considerations of the broadest and least tangible
sort? More investment, greater automation, higher productivity—but
will the geese still fly north and south in season, will there be white
sand for the surf to roll upon, will trees and wildflowers beckon from
beyond the door-yard, will pinkletinks sound their peeping from the
marshes in April? Will the world be as livable as we know it today, and
will new generations be as free?"
Those, indeed, are becoming desperately pertinent questions.
It is easy to recall, of course, that a number of past civilizations
have collapsed because their elite classes became caught up in a
preoccupation with pleasures, possessions, and trivialities. Then, it was
not conceivable that there would be enough surplus of goods to permit
the hedonism to extend to the masses. Adlai Stevenson, pointing to past
societies that had collapsed because of the hedonism of their ruling
classes, said: "All these facts of history do not lose their point because
the pleasures of today are mass pleasures and no longer enjoyments of
an elite. If we become a nation of Bourbons, numbers won't save us."
Two massive obstacles appear to stand in the way of any notable
change from the current drift of the American style of life.
One is the widespread faith of Americans that their technology can
solve all their problems. This faith persists even though this technology
is pushing them relentlessly toward ever-greater giantism and evergreater productivity based on automation, which requires ever-greater
consumption.
If Americans are to become masters of their destiny in terms of style
of life, they must come to terms with their machines. A first step would
be to recognize that the nation's exploding technology is not an
unalloyed boon. A number of leading technologists are themselves now
recognizing this.
Detlev W. Bronk, president of the National Academy of Sciences,
now stresses that "the applications of science are creating problems as
well as opportunities. . . . One thing that disturbs me is the idea that
science can solve everything"—including the rapid disappearance of
natural resources. Actually, he said, "what man chooses to do with the
discoveries of science and their applications is beyond science."
Others have urged that Americans have no illusions about the
capacity of technology to solve essentially human problems. One of the
great heroes of modern technology, Charles A. Lindbergh, voiced his
own disillusionment in one of his few public comments in recent
decades when he stated: 1
"I grew up as a disciple of science. I know its fascination. I have felt
the godlike power man derives from his machines. . . . Now I have lived
to experience the early results of scientific materialism. I have watched
men turn into human cogs in the factories they believed would enrich
their lives. I have watched pride in workmanship leave and human
character decline as efficiency of production lines increased. . . . We
still have the possibility, here in America, of building a civilization
based on Man, where the importance of an enterprise is judged less by
its financial profits than by the kind of community it creates; where the
measure of a man is his own character, not his power or his wealth."
Americans need not stand by helplessly and let their technology
carry them willy-nilly in a direction that raises their apprehension. They
can refuse to let technology dominate their lives. They can deliberately
decentralize its organized manifestations. They can insist that
noneconomic factors as well as economic ones be weighed in setting
their society's course.
One of the challenges they face is that of working out a tolerable
relationship with their machines, a relationship that leaves the
possibility for the human spirit to soar. It can be done. But, as Charles
Lindbergh points out, the time is short.
The second massive obstacle standing in the way of any significant
shift in the American style of life is the all-pervading commercialism of
the environment in which they live and breathe. Americans
consequently are under fairly constant pressure to appraise their life
satisfaction on the basis of material possessions.
Before this can change, Americans need to develop a discontent
with those among the admen who proudly call themselves merchants of
discontent. Perhaps the average American will develop a resistance that
will force a change, as a result of the mounting barrage of selling
messages. It is even possible that the sellers, for the sake of their own
self-esteem, will voluntarily seek to become more universally
scrupulous, conscientious, discreet, and courteous.
Advertising men are more inclined now to self-examination than
any other group in the American society. They wince at the image of
huckster that has become rather permanently hung on them and they
seem willing to go to some lengths to remove it. This may be a happy
omen for the future.
Advertising in the past three decades has grown into one of the great
instruments of social control operating in the United States. It has joined
the church, the school, and industry as a major influence on people's
lives. David M. Potter, Yale University historian, points out, however,
that the traditional institutions have tried to improve man and to develop
in him qualities of social value.2
The church appeals to the spirit and conscience of man and tries to
implement the golden rule. The school appeals to the reason of man and
offers the hope of a perfected society through wisdom and stimulated
ability. And even industry appeals to the ambition of man and offers the
reward of fulfillment through one's creation. If advertising is to grow up
to its power as an instrument of social control, it must develop ideals of
social value for the improvement of man, ideas that go beyond keeping
him discontented.
In fairness it should be noted that advertising does, by stimulating
wants, promote a high-output economy, which in turn generates jobs
and investment and raises the level of material consumption, whether
that level particularly needs raising or not. But Professor Potter is
correct in stating that advertising does little to develop qualities of
social value in man himself. In early 1960, billboards were making
perhaps the best claim currently possible: "ADVERTISING HELPS YOU
ENJOY THE GOOD LIFE."
"The Good Life" here presumably means the abundant life.
Perhaps we will see a change. Perhaps this infant institution, as it
matures, will develop an idealism, a deeper sense of responsibility, and
a mission to improve man in ways that will have enduring value. Let us
hope that this evolution will come in decades rather than the
millenniums which it took the other institutions to develop.
Advertising leaders have recently been drawing up manifestoes that
have a revolutionary ring. They talk about the need for a new ethical
course and for helping the nation achieve a new sense of purpose and
dedication to the right and good. The president of the Advertising
Council asserted: "A good many people are getting fed up with
dishonesty and phoniness and the extreme success worship."
The public can encourage the trend of advertisers to grope for a new
and higher course by rewarding—by their purchases and comments—
those advertisers who make their appeals in a responsible, respectful,
and dignified manner, and who show awareness that there can be
important nonmaterial values in life.
As we have seen, one area where excessive commercialization has
in recent years particularly impinged upon the public is television, since
the average family keeps its set turned on 38½ hours a week. It offers a
good place for the public to demand a change because television
stations are presumed by law to be serving the general welfare in their
use of the airways.
Despite that legal assumption, the United States stands alone among
the Western democracies in being bereft of any working philosophy
about the use of the public airways in the best interests of the public.
(Countries such as Holland and France have been barring television
commercials entirely.)
Fortunately, a search has begun to try to find ways to reduce the
high element of commercialization in television broadcasting—in both
the programing and the commercials themselves. We should bear in
mind that television—unlike the institution of the newspaper, which has
had centuries to develop a tradition of editorial independence—is a new
institution that came into being when the pressures of
commercialization were most massive. Despite occasional brilliant
performances and brave stands by individual broadcasters, television
still has much to learn about establishing a philosophy of operation that
will be a credit to the nation and that will endure.
One minimum objective, it seems to me, would be for the networks
to take away from the advertiser all control over program content. Great
Britain's commercial television broadcasting company, I.T.A., might
serve as a model. It sells the advertiser spots for his messages but does
not permit the advertiser to have any control over the program that
comes before or after the message. Even Advertising Age editorially
supported such divorcement—and was denounced by a great many
admen for doing so.
A second minimum objective should be to require licensing of
television networks, and on terms that require them to strive for a better
balance of public-service programing. One of the most preposterous
aspects of broadcasting is that individual television stations are licensed,
but the networks which now handle the programing for most of the
shows that appear over most of the stations are not licensed. C.B.S. and
N.B.C. have sought to raise the level of public-service programing but
have been largely checkmated by A.B.C., which pours out mass
entertainment stuff most of the day and night. Television critic Jack
Gould summed up the results in these words: "Three networks soliciting
the same aggressive customers are functioning in a jungle of their own
devising. Let one network aspire to nobler performance, and there will
be others wooing its clients with the temptations of gangster shows and
higher ratings." To license networks, legislation would have to be
passed that would call for affirmative votes from congressmen who
need exposure on television to get elected and who often need
contributions from companies that are major television sponsors.
However, congressmen have in the past enacted legislation in the public
interest over the strenuous opposition of directly affected groups, and
the number of bills congressmen have been proposing recently that are
being opposed by advertising spokesmen in Washington suggests that
many congressmen may be in a mood to take hold of the horns of the
bull.
A third possibility—and now we are becoming more drastic—
would be to establish a counterbalance to the existing networks by
setting up a public corporation comparable to Britain's B.B.C., which
would broadcast purely in the public interest.
John Fischer, editor of Harper's magazine, has advanced an
interesting variation. He suggests that the government charge existing
broadcasters a rental for their use of the public airways and use the
money to endow a public-service broadcasting agency that would seek
to improve the quality of broadcasting by buying time on the regular
networks to present programs of excellence.
One of the best hopes for improving television content and reducing
commercialism on the air is "pay-TV," which has proved highly
successful in tests in Toronto, and trials are planned for the near future
in a number of American cities, including Hartford, Connecticut. In
pay-TV the cost of financing the broadcast of programs of high interest
is paid by the owners of television sets. They may do this, for example,
by dropping coins in a meter attached to their sets.
The potential of pay-TV is perhaps best demonstrated by the fact
that many advertising and network television officials and motionpicture theater owners have been viewing it with unrelieved horror. The
"free"-television people express concern about the great financial
burden to the family that would have to spend a dollar in order for all its
members to see a great current Broadway play on their set or a first-run
movie.
Before we become too horrified ourselves at this burden, we might
recall that the family listening to the "free," sponsored television
programs typically spends about six solid hours a week listening to
commercials on television. That comes to more than three hundred
hours of listening to commercials a year. If a person were hired to sit
through three hundred hours of commercials, what would he charge?
The usual rate for human guinea pigs is about $2 an hour, which means
that this person should want at least $600 a year for the time spent
listening to the commercials that the average family hears in a year.
One hazard for pay-TV is that if it does become successfully
established and draws a great audience, advertisers are likely to try to
move in and offer to help the producers underwrite their costs in
exchange for selling time. Advertising journals already are speculating
that if pay-TV becomes too successful advertisers may have to "break
down the gates" to "get their message across to viewers."
All this indicates, I think, that the problem of lifting the allpervading smog of commercialism in American life is going to be no
easy task. But it must be done if the nation's citizens are to achieve an
environment conducive to self-respect, serenity, and individual
fulfillment.
Sir Herbert Read has suggested that "mankind will perhaps grow
tired of its playthings and cast them aside; universal boredom will lead
to universal despair, and art will be renewed when life itself has to be
renewed."
Boredom and despair quite possibly are already starting to produce
a cultural renaissance in America. A number of cities are planning
cultural centers. We should, however, withhold judgment on the depth
of this suspected renaissance until we know more about it. The mass
marketers and status promoters have moved into culture in a large way.
Thus we have tens of thousands of Americans taking art lessons by
correspondence from organizations that often resemble factories.
We should perhaps be most heartened by signs of cultural pursuit
that individuals undertake spontaneously by themselves and which
require them to be more than passive listeners or spectators. Such forms
of communication can give dignity and grandeur to man. Thus I think it
exciting to come across a group of neighbors in Racine, Wisconsin, who
have taken up madrigal singing on Saturday nights. Some families,
turning inward, have been forming string quartets and voice quartets.
And small neighborhood groups in many parts of the nation have been
meeting once a month, often on Saturday nights, to discuss books that
they have found to be particularly provocative or enthralling.
Serious reading requires an exercise of concentration, private
imagination, and applied intelligence that takes it out of the category of
spectator recreations. This is perhaps why it has far fewer devotees than
television watching. A Gallup Poll has found that most Americans
questioned could not recall reading any kind of book in the past year.
This finding came at a time when American homes were reported to be
almost fully saturated with television sets. Adult Americans still read
only one third as many books per year as adult Britons. Only one
American adult in about three hundred reads serious books on his own
initiative with any regularity. Think of any important, serious book in
the past year. You will not find a single copy of it anywhere in most of
the counties of the United States, according to an estimate by the
American Book Publishers Council.
Many million Americans are showing a new interest in expressing
themselves through painting, sculpture, and handicraft, without the
benefit of do-it-yourself kits. Such Americans might well emulate the
Japanese in developing a private world of creativity for themselves.
Most Japanese homes have a tokonoma, or honored alcove, for
displaying the family's work of art. John Keats reports that no Japanese
family is too poor to boast such an alcove, "for that work of art is nearly
always handmade. It may be a flower arrangement, an illuminated
scroll, a poem, a painting. But whatever the work, it represents in every
way the spirit of the family."
Such reflective, private pursuits as I have briefly indicated may help
Americans gain a new perspective on their possessions in relation to
other life satisfactions. More of them may see that cherished values and
integrity of the soul have more to do with a well-spent life than selfindulgence. As Reinhold Niebuhr has observed, the dimensions of
human existence "which give dignity to man are easily obscured and
vulgarized in a culture which places undue emphasis upon living
standards."
Many Americans with a fine home and fine possessions lead
civilized, modest, deeply meaningful lives. But they are not absorbed
with their possessions, and they recognize that there is only a modest
connection between possessions and life satisfaction, except as
possessions are able to corrupt.
A sociologist in Endicott, New York, told me that the happiest, most
satisfying days of his married life were spent living in a trailer camp
outside Atlanta soon after marriage. All the couple's neighbors were as
poor as they were. They all shared toilet and washing facilities. And
they shared a can of beer, he said, as if it were champagne. After sixteen
years, he related, four of this couple's closest permanent friends are
people they met in that camp many hundreds of miles away.
Actress Siobhan McKenna makes a trip every summer to the bleak
Aran Islands of Ireland to live a while with the fishermen and sheep
clippers there. They are a joyful, hospitable people who always have a
welcome pot of tea ready for a visitor. She says that she makes this
annual trip in order to renew her faith in the essential pride and nobility
of human beings who still come to grips with the cosmos instead of
with artificial problems that people invent for themselves.
I find myself often seeking out the older New England villages that
have changed relatively little—except for a gas station or two—in
recent decades. I, too, feel a freshening of the spirit when I stroll about
the tree-shaded village green, peer into the lovely old spired, clean-lined
churches, visit the still picturesque stores, chat with the natives, and
walk among their two-century-old homes.
It often occurs to me as I stroll that the mass merchandisers of the
sixties—with all their huffing and puffing to sell their packaged dream
communities—have not been able even to approach creating as fine an
environment for life as was created in these old villages in what are now
the backwaters of the United States. And by environment I mean not
only physical but spiritual and political.
In my strolls I am reminded, too, that one of the wisest, gayest, most
inspiring, and most courageous persons my family has encountered in
the past decade is a woman in her seventies who lives alone by the sea
in a lonely New England cottage. In her cottage she has no electricity,
running water, or telephone. She chops her own wood, which she drags
from the sea. This woman earns a very modest income floating sea
mosses onto paper by a secret process she devised and selling the results
as greeting cards. They are exquisite. Each one is different.
Encounters with such memorable individuals suggest to me that
most of us might feel better about our lives if we gave a higher priority
to striving for:
Greater humility and idealism.
At least occasional dedication to the problems of people beyond the
walls of our home.
Deeply cherished personal goals.
A judicious attitude toward the values receivable from personal
possessions.
Strongly held personal standards on what is good and evil.
Strongly held personal standards on what constitutes success and
failure for ourselves.
If adversity must be the prod for us to take a larger interest in such
matters, it might still represent a gain.
A people as ingenious and enterprising as Americans, however,
should be able to solve the new problems posed by their fabulously
productive machines without undue adversity and without being forced
to make a virtue of wastefulness.
The central challenge seems to be this: Americans must learn to live
with their abundance without being forced to impoverish their spirit by
being damned fools about it.
Reference Notes
CHAPTER 3
1. John Keats, The Insolent Chariots (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Co.,
1958), p. 230.
2. Victor Lebow, The Journal of Retailing, Spring 1955, p. 7; Winter
1955-56, p. 166.
3. Vance Packard, The Status Seekers, 1959; The Hidden Persuaders,
1957 (New York: David Mckay Company, Inc. London:
Longmans, Green & Co Ltd.).
CHAPTER 5
1. Sales Management, August 21, 1959, p. 86.
2. Time, January 5, 1959, Business section.
3. Sales Management, September 19, 1958, p. 33.
4. Federal Trade Commission Order #6203, issued August 7, 1958.
CHAPTER 6
1. US. vs. G.E. Civil Action #1364. A detailed analysis of the case
appears in a volume published by the Twentieth Century Fund
entitled Cartels in Action. Its authors were research directors for
the Fund's study, George W. Stocking and Myron W. Watkins.
CHAPTER 7
1. Journal of Commerce, February 26, 1959, p. 9.
2. Women's Wear Daily, May 7, 1958, p. 12.
CHAPTER 8
1. Automotive News, December 29, 1858, p. 13.
2. Report of the US. Senate Antitrust and Monopoly Subcommittee of
the Committee on the Judiciary, 85th Congress, 2nd Session.
November 1, 195S. "A Study of Administered Prices in
Automotive Industry," p. 85.
3. The Wall Street Journal, March 23, 1960, p. 1.
4. Business Review of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, April
1959, p. 2.
CHAPTER 10
1. Reported in Consumer Reports, October 1955, p. 483.
2. The New York Times, September 21, 1958, p. 1, Business section.
3. The New York Herald Tribune, July 30, 1959, p. 5, sect. 3.
4. The Appliance Manufacturer, August 1959, p. 45.
5. Retailing Daily, March 7, 1957, p. 4.
CHAPTER 11
1. Business Week, November 10, 1956, p. 123.
2. Home Furnishings Daily, March 18, 1959, p. 24.
3. Retailing Daily, January 23, 1956, p. 130.
4. Home Furnishings Daily, December 31, 1957, pp. 3, 19.
5. Retailing Daily, June 7, 19S6, pp. 1, 32.
CHAPTER 12
1. From The Machinist, quoted by Sidney Margolius, April 28, 1958.
2. Retailing Daily, January 16, 1957.
CHAPTER 13
1. Home Furnishings Daily, July 24, 1958.
2. Louis Cheskin, Why People Buy (New York: Liveright Publishing
Corporation, 1959), p. 65.
3. Pierre Martineau, Motivation in Advertising (New York: McGrawHill Book Co., 1957).
CHAPTER 14
1. William Attwood, Still The Most Exciting Country (New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.), p. 39.
2. Joseph Wechsberg, The New Yorker, October 17, 1959, p. 166.
CHAPTER 17
1. Look, October 28, 1958.
2. Leather and Shoes, September 19, 1959, p. 4.
CHAPTER 20
1. The New York Times Magazine, December 1, 1957, p. 21.
2. Joseph Wood Krutch, Human Nature and The Human Condition
(New York: Random House, 1959), p. 36.
3. Eugene Kinkead, "The Study of Something New in History," The
New Yorker, October 26, 1957, p. 138.
CHAPTER 21
1. Consumer Reports, May 1960, p. 263,
CHAPTER 22
1. Retailing Daily, January 23, 1956, p. 20, quoting president of the
Quality Furniture Manufacturing Company.
2. National Standards in a Modern Economy, edited by Dickson Reck
(New York: Harper & Brothers, 1956), p. 315.
3. Home Furnishings Daily, March 13, 1959, p. 1.
CHAPTER 23
1. "Problems in Review: Planned Obsolescence," Harvard Business
Review, September-October 1959.
CHAPTER 24
1. The Exploding Metropolis, by the Editors of Fortune (New York:
Double-day Anchor Books, 1957).
2. Robert Heilbroner, "The Price of Growth," The Reporter, January 7,
1960, p. 32.
CHAPTER 25
1. Charles Lindbergh, Of Flight and Life (New York: Charles Scribner's
Sons, 1948).
2. David M. Potter, People of Plenty (Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press, 1954), p. 176.